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Young people of today live in a media world. They make intensive use of media in order to amuse, inform or orientate themselves, in order to be able to cope with individual and social tasks. For these sectors, media offer many opportunities, but they also contain considerable risks. In order to recognize these opportunities and risks and to enjoy an easy command of multimedia resources, media competence is indispensable. It is undisputed that all educational institutions – from kindergarten, youth work, schools, universities, adult and parent education, to archives, museums, multimedia resource centres and other repositories of our collective memory – must integrate media education into the scope of their tasks and contribute to the fostering of and training in media competence.
Active media work has established itself as a hands-on method of media education. Doing it yourself – the productive and creative structuring and designing of media features (audio, film/video, multimedia) – has proved itself as an especially effective method of fostering media competence. Adolescents learn in this way to use media as a means of communication and interaction. Aided by media, they can develop their topics and publicly articulate their positions, concerns, opinions, mental or emotional states, etc. In the process they become acquainted with the creative means and manipulative potential of the individual media; they get a behind-the-scenes look at production, learn to research and evaluate media-transmitted information; and on publication of their media productions they find out how listeners and viewers react to their media-projected messages and statements. This gives adolescents a chance to develop, by active media work, critical distance to commercial media productions, to employ media productively and creatively for their own purposes, and all in all to achieve an easy command of media resources.
Many of the media productions of young people are also extremely interesting documents of the times, since they show what topics young people address, and what means they use to explore them. The video productions originating in the last 25 years – i.e., since the beginning of widespread video activity – are excellent youth-culture and socio-political documents of this period.
The media productions of young people are also of great interest to the “disseminators” in the field of education, since many productions are suitable for use in their own educational work or motivate them to initiate media-education activity of their own.
Young people working on media productions, which are largely under media-education guidance, produce written material and pictures on their own; but for the soundtracks of their features, especially the videos (feature films, documentaries, experimental films, etc.) as well as some of their multimedia productions, they resort to the use of copyrighted musical works: Either they begin with their pictures and add the proper dramatic suspense by choosing suitable excerpts from commercial music titles they know, or, conversely, they take their musical favourites and “illustrate” them with associative images (music clips). That is to say, the use of brief musical excerpts is the rule prevailing in young people’s films. Regarding these media productions, media-education institutions have long been pointing out to the youth production groups the existing copyright problems, as well as the justified interests of the authors, producers, etc. regarding protection.
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From the media-education perspective, all the aforementioned activities are meaningful and necessary. Media competence, both as key and core qualification, is indispensable for the development of a society that is able to meet the challenges of the future. Such competence can be precisely and systematically fostered by active media work. This is also confirmed by the resolutions adopted by the Kultusministerkonferenz (Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany) reiterating the need to teach media competence.
Since copyright law provides no operating limits that cover and regulate non-commercial media-education productions, many media-education activities are encountering legal hurdles, being subject to the same overall copyright terms that apply to professional and commercial media productions, although the two categories are far from comparable. In consequence of this situation, media features created by children and young people either cannot be disseminated or they are disseminated despite the legal inadmissibility of the practice. The present conditions add up to an irreconcilable relationship of tension between the justified interests of the authors/creators and the holders of performing rights on the one hand, and the educational mandate for media education on the other.
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The media-education institutions have a massive interest in being able to carry on their work with children and young people in a framework of legality. To do this, a solution must be found on the basis of existing copyright law – a solution reflecting the justified interests of the authors/creators and the holders of performing rights while making provision for the basic essentials of media education. A sensible solution appears to be the conclusion of general agreements between the Kultusministerkonferenz and the licensing agencies as the representatives of the authors/creators and the holders of performing rights – agreements allowing the media-education institutions not only to bring into being non-commercial media productions by children and young people but also to make them publicly accessible via defined “platforms”, for example, specific festivals plus the news coverage of these, and other educational events or Internet forums.
The media-education institutions commit themselves in this connection to systematically track and register these productions and, if need arises, to take care of adherence to restrictions regarding time and space.
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