E-Book Overview
A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the Rocky theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? Eyes on the Prize, the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound by Law? reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property, and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.Readers can download a pdf of the book here.
E-Book Content
Keith Aoki James Boyle Jennifer Jenkins
Foreword by Davis Guggenheim Introduction by Cory Doctorow
Duke University Press 2008
Copyright © 2006, 2008 Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins This work is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, Share-alike license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ This license gives you important freedoms, including the right to copy and distribute this book noncommercially without permission or fee, so long as you adhere to the terms described below.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 You are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work to make derivative works Under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute the work as: Bound By Law © 2006, 2008 Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Duke University Press Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aoki, Keith Bound by law? : tales from the public domain / Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins — New expanded ed. p. cm. — ISBN 978-0-8223-4418-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Fair use (Copyright) — United States — Caricatures and cartoons. 2. Public domain (Copyright law) — United States — Caricatures and cartoons. 3. Copyright — United States — Caricatures and cartoons. I. Boyle, James, 1959–. II. Jenkins, Jennifer. KF3050 .A54 2008 346.730482 — dc22
Foreword
by Davis Guggenheim, Academy Award-winning director of the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" As a director and producer of both commercial and non-commercial projects, I find myself on both sides of the war that rages around copyright and the public domain. In my last movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” we had a terrible time clearing footage of all kinds. Simply finding the source and status of archival footage nearly brought my production to its knees. We faced stressful and urgent questions like: Who owns this? Will anyone who thinks they own this sue me? Even though it was considered public domain ten years ago, is there a possibility someone might claim this? Will the lawyers for the production company and studio accept the conclusion I have carefully drawn and allow me to use it in the film? I have lost many shots and sequences because I wasn't able to answer these questions. The worst example of this happened when I was making a film called “The First Year,” a documentary which followed five teachers through their treacherous first year of teaching public school. In the climactic scene, one