The value of reuse rights has been on our minds lately at The Scholarly Kitchen. While the reuse of research data and methodologies seems of obvious benefit, questions still remain about the value of reuse rights to the actual books and articles that describe research discoveries. It’s hard to find concrete examples of CC BY licensed scholarly articles being re-purposed to the community’s benefit, and Martin Paul Eve wrote this week about some of the downsides.

All of which came to mind when I came across the video below, chronicling the long history of Disney Studios recycling pieces of animation over and over again in their films. While the idea was to save time and to copy something quickly rather than drawing something anew, animator Floyd Norman notes that it probably didn’t result in any savings and was more trouble than just animating a new scene.

There’s a really interesting lesson in here about technology and the changing nature of how media is consumed. Disney could get away with blatantly ripping itself off because at the time, movies came out years apart and no one would ever have the ability to look at two films side by side. Then came home video, and worse, YouTube. Computer animation has made this no longer necessary, but it remains an interesting piece of film history. I’m not sure if there’s a metaphor here for reuse of the scholarly literature though.