Whose is this song

During the Collaborative Online Video workshop, Seda Gurses, who is connected to the hypermedia and databases research group at the University of Leuven, showed a trailer of the film Whose Is This Song? by Adela Peeva, to illustrate that data travels beyond defined bounderies and legal property arrangements, that re-use and appropriation by different actors is quite common to cultural and folkloristic practices, not surprising in the age of endless debates on piracy, file sharing and digital rights management, but the protagonists in this documentary demonstrate that even singing a seemingly harmless song can stir up politically charged emotions about cultural territory, authorship, the right to copy and ownership of cultural expressions.

Stoffel Debuysere writes a nice post about the film on his blog Diagonal Thoughts, with embedded low quality video footage.

Find here another interesting review.

Here’s a videoclip of Seda’s introduction. (Ogg video, 18 min, 58 mb)

Posted on: Tuesday, January 6, 2009 by: in category: Collaborative Online Video workshop, Films and Projects