It's a Wonderful Property

Free     (?)	Stolen     (?)
Streaming	Streaming
Note: the streaming versions will be offline while my computer is installed at Hallwalls
Sample clip	Sample clip

It's A Wonderful Property explores the difficult-to-describe boundaries between right and wrong, when it comes to modern copyright law and the appropriation of material thought to be part of the public commons. It takes the form of two infinite, automatically generated, real-time video streams.

It's A Wonderful Life entered the public domain in 1974, when its copyright was not renewed. Nevertheless, Republic Pictures asserted control via copyright on the story on which the film was based (and the musical score). Hence, any derivative work that shows the non-free storyline of this "free" film is presumably a violation.

Litigation over hip-hop music has led to a belief (by media corporations) that any sampling of a copyrighted work, no matter how transformative, is a violation - whether the sampled work is utterly unrecognizable is irrelevant.

Free (?) extracts a constantly meandering tiny fragment of the frames of It's A Wonderful Life. The fragments are too small to reproduce the storyline. This is what remains of the film's "public-domain-ness" It might be legal.

Stolen (?) continuously mixes hundreds of frames from many sequences of the film. The individual sampled sequences reveal the storyline, and so would be copyright violations. It's probably illegal.

Technical notes:

The "streaming" links are the live versions of the videos, being generated in real time. They currently run at a slideshow speed, while I investigate appropriate Free/Open-Source tools for doing the streaming at faster rates.

The "sample clip" links show 1 minute, canned, full-frame-rate versions of the video streams.