Most of you have heard of Facebook Celebrity Doppleganger week by now. Because viruses spread unequally I think it’s actually in week three.
The way it works is simple. You change your profile picture to that of a celebrity that someone once told you you look like.
Here’s what I find interesting — it looks to me like between a half and a quarter of people in my neck of the woods are doing this, and I would bet that not a single one of them stopped to think if they were infringing on the rights of the person who took the photograph they used.
Really. Grandmothers, kids, technophobes. A massive amount of people who just assumed this was perfectly fine.
Because, of course, it *is* perfectly fine. You wouldn’t know it from recent history, but using media in this way is as fair as fair use gets.
For quite a number of people, this may have been the first mashup they’ve done (yes, mashup: your profile + a celebrity photo = strangely appropriate pairing, that’s a mashup). And copyright wasn’t even a thought, even when that Facebook TOS checkbox came up.
Once you express yourself with extant media, you start to realize media is words, and banning it’s reuse makes as little sense as banning words.
Millions of people created their first mashup this week, from grandmothers to schoolchildren. And copyright didn’t cross their mind.
Worth thinking about.