"Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain" Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins.
This online comic book helps to outline the general concept of fair use in copyright law including elements that are inherently in danger of stifling artistic achievement.
The comic strip begins with consideration of the "clearing rights" concepts which involve the "process of finding the rights holder, and getting permission or paying to use material." This is supposed to be an effective measure that helps to protect previous creative work, however the crux issue of this work, is that Documentarians deal with more than just other people's rights. What it really comes down to is what is listed under copyright law as public domain, page 10 has a general outline. Broken down, the table shown contains the generality that any work created after 1/1/1978 will be protected "when the work is fixed in a tangible medium of expression." The eight types of works that are protectable are listed on page 29. A good portion of the comic book pertains to a little line on page 14, "Fair use Should mean you don't need permission for incidentally captured fragments. But the practice is often different." It seems a little outrageous to charge $10,000 to include a 4.5 second Simpson's clip accidentally included in filming. To prevent further problems and stifling creativity the comic strip author's suggest that filmmakers research fair use and make "collective decisions about what's fair"; though I'm not completely certain that it would protect them if they broke copyright law similarly as a group. Another powerful question was posed, "Do we want to give copyright holders a veto over history?", after inclusion of the Dr. King's estate claiming copyright over his speeches, photos, and interviews. Another important issue considered is the extension of term limits from 1978 to 1998 and on extending copyright terms from 28 years to 50 years to 70 years past the death of the author (95 for corporate authors). The end seemed appropriate with the inclusion the ecological, naming there are some entities or parcels that need to be private, however when it comes to creativity, fair use needs to be extended somewhat. This is definitely a complicated issue, whether copyright laws should be able to limit artistic creativity in order to maintain the source's originality. How should this be limited, and how should regulation occur, who decides.
3 comments:
Dear God I think both of these articles were tedious, not because of their construction necessarily, mostly because of the subject matter. It makes me grateful that, for the moment, most work I produce is for school and any other works I use should be covered by the fair use act. At least if the guidelines for fiar use outlined in a "Crash course in Copyright" can trusted as adequate protection. But then I read about incidental and accidental use in "Bound by Law" costing filmmakers thousands of dollars and hours of reediting time and it becomes clear that fair use doesn't necessarily protect one from the irritating and expensive process of legality.
Case in point. I read a webcomic called 8 bit Theatre in which the author of the comic creates unique comics using 8 bit images from Final Fantasy 1, copyrighted by Square Enix. The disclaimer at the bottom of his comic pages used rea, rather saucily, (paraphrasing) that though the images were produced by Squaresoft in the early 80's, his use of them was covered by the Fair Use ACt, so there. After I had been reading the comic for over a year this disclaimer mysteriously disappeared and was replaced by a simple line stating that "Some images may be the property of Square-Enix" I doubt that was Brian acting independently. So why did he need to make the change in his disclaimer?
All I could conclude from both articles is that Copyright and Fair use laws create a lot of job and work for people like lawyers, publishers, and producers.
In a digital context, I'd imagine that the issues get even more nebleous, especially when images and video can be easily cut and pasted from one site to another and many of them are not openly claimed. Then there is the issue of bit torrent and file sharing. While leagues of lawyers are currently outlingin the cases that prove these actions are in violation of copyright, what is to be done about the current copyright violations beign made? I know that the idea of collecting all the personal account information of Kazaa users and sueing each one individually has been suggested before.
Yes, very tedious. It just kept going and going and despite the fun comics the boring subject matter won.
After reading this entire comic I was amazed at how much goes into copy rights. I'm still not sure I quite grasped everything, but what I did understand I didn't like.
I get that it is supposed to protect the work that people do, and that is great, but what about future works? Copy rights seem to me to be stunting the growth of future works. If I had done something worth remembering, and it in turn inspired some one to create something, I would be flattered. I would not want to sue them for $10,000. I think the system coule use some work.
The rediculous "Fair Use" examples sited in this comic book remind me of recent law suits. IE, someone suing McDonalds (I think) because their coffee burned them when it got spilled on them. This would be the most well known of these types of cases. I guess if you own the rights to the "Rocky" song, you gotta take it for all it's worth though.
I think the comic book format for this was fantastic. A comic book is something that would obviously have to go through copyright processes. It was also very acessable. It didn't need to be put in this format, but I feel it did itself a favor because of it.
If there is one thing that we have learned through this piece, it is that if any of us are considering making some sort of documentary film ever in life, we need to stop thinking about it right now.
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