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Judge Pierre Leval’s commentary on the centrality of transformativeness in interpreting fair use decisively changed the way the copyright doctrine was interpreted. He leveraged the forum successful...

Over the past three decades, open licensing has evolved from hacker culture thought experiment to a transformative force in applied copyright across a range of industries. Yet very little empirical...

This article draws from data generated in existing studies in Australia and the U.S. to examine how creators describe themselves and their creative acts when they are recombining or trying to combine copyrighted work with their own work. It finds a surprising congruence of self-perception across very different copyright regimes and creative practices. An undercurrent of Romantic notions about the originality of creative genius runs through even cutting-edge digital practices. This attitude then bolsters strategies used by large media interests to expand copyright monopoly rights and extend them internationally. Results have implications both for policy and advocacy, in particular, how creators respond to campaigns for expanded copyright exceptions, and a reluctance by even remix creators to challenge the legal structures that restrict their creative practice.

Barbara Kopple has both worked within, and helped to shape, a changing documentary environment. This chapter discusses the changing options and creative solutions Kopple has faced in funding and distributing her work. The independent documentary scene Kopple first encountered involved being funded primarily through government agencies and private foundations and distributed in theatres and on public television. She went on to explore relationships with major network television networks (e.g. Homicide) and cable outlets. She has developed a substantial body of work in sponsored documentaries, profiling organizations and people with whom she politically or socially has some kind of affinity. Throughout, she has been able to maintain relationships and exploit existing markets while exploring new ones. The chapter examines how her career also tracks the changing conditions for independent documentary filmmakers.

This examination of the career of Julia Reichert-a three-time Oscar nominee, the recipient of two lifetime achievement awards, and the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2019-follows the trajectory of her oeuvre, which intertwines social commitment and aesthetic concern. Reichert's work is a rare example of U.S. working-class film art made about working-class people. Her career parallels the evolution of a genre of socially-committed documentary in the U.S.

the interactive documentary, still barely emergent, has attracted both enthusiasm and analysis. Despite the cautions of Lev Manovich against the inexactitude of the term "interactive" (since all art at some level is interactive), the term "interactive" has come to be generally used to designate multimedia, mostly screen-based storytelling. Sessions at film festivals and even entire conferences on interactive documentary are now standard. At the standard-setting South by Southwest (SXSW) event in Austin, Texas, a strand of interactive documentary that finds overlapping audiences between SXSW's Interactive and Film conferences has become a place where even standing room is highly prized. Tribeca, Sheffield, and IDFA (International Film Festival at Amsterdam) film festivals have interactive strands/conferences. Events such as "Future of StoryTelling," "TransVergence," and "Power to the Pixel" are among the many venues where professionals exchange stories and hints about making these new works. Entities as diverse as the US Army (Myers),1 the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and US public television stations ("Localore") 2 are developing interactive projects (Stogner).TaxonomiesAt the same time, early academic work is being done on taxonomies for interactive documentary (Nash). Indeed, the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, founded in 2012, features a research forum in which this is one of the issues. One way to organize the categories is by technical approaches: Web documentary, transmedia, and interactive documentary (O'Flynn). In this taxonomy, Web documentaries, such as the series Black Folk Don't (blackfolkdont.com, since 2012), use the Web as a distribution platform for typically static material, which the viewer can select from. Transmedia projects are constructed across various platforms, as in the Exit Zero Project (exitzeroproject.org, 2013), which occurs across a book, a film, and a Web database, and Reinvention Stories (reinventionstories.org, 2013), featuring short films, a tour with audio and video stops, and a site for contributed knowledge. (Transmedia projects may also involve performances and geo-located games such as scavenger hunts.) Although some of these applications may be interactive, some transmedia projects allow only a selection of material rather than contributions. Finally, interactive documentaries have user participation built into their action and typically feature databases as integral to their actions. Just a Reflektor (justareflektor. com, 2014) is one example.Other conceptualizations are also being tried out. Sandra Gaudenzi has created taxonomies rooted in experience, describing interactive documentaries in terms of how viewers are positioned (e.g., conversational, experiential) and as semi-closed (user can choose what material to browse), semi-open (user can add material but not change structure), or open (system adapts to all inputs). These categories overlap with O'Flynn's. Maggie Burnette Stogner argues for three nonexclusive categories, based not on conceptual purity but on perceived areas of media activity, within a general trend of production that she calls "user-centric": participatory (an entirely distributed and mostly unstructured experience), collective (an experience that involves participation within a structure), and mobile (in which participation is often overlaid on the physical world and experiences within it).StoryCode designers, professionals who create transmedia works, describe the range with the graphic (Abiodun and Knowlton) shown in Figure 1.Thus, not even taxonomies are yet stable in this kind of work. The conceptual problems in imagining such work are complicated not only by the level of interactivity but also by the fact that the interactivity takes place, potentially, across so many spaces and platforms in a user's life. The environment within which such work is located now encompasses both physical and virtual space, represented wryly by Gary Hayes as shown in Figure 2. …

This study explores the problems that US journalists face in employing the copyright doctrine of fair use under copyright in their work, and heralds a solution. US copyright policy's expansion of monopoly rights since 1976, harshly shrinking the public domain, has forced journalists to understand their fair use rights better. Fair use permits use of copyrighted material without permission or payment, under some circumstances. Without vigorous application of fair use, freedom of the press and its public sphere functions are impaired. Interviews with 81 journalists in a range of media show that journalists receive inadequate and conflicting fair use advice in their education and work environments, and often share misinformation. As a consequence they delay, limit coverage and even choose not to release information. The problem is most acute in emergent digital platforms and in small organizations. Journalists made aware of this problem have taken action to shape a set of principles interpreting their fair u...

The documentary genre in film makes distinctive claims to honesty and truth. While filmmakers do not promise objectivity and balance, and while they all recognize that all expression is crafted and not a simple mirror of reality, the form is defined by its claim to say something honestly about something that really happened. Filmmakers' ethical judgments implicitly or explicitly revolve around this defining feature of the genre (Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). This paper discusses the results of a study on how documentary filmmakers in the USA perceive what common ethical challenges are, and how these filmmakers commonly address those challenges in the absence of a formally articulated code of ethics or shared institutional regulations. Ethics is considered as the application of general moral precepts within professional practice.

Media literacy educators make active use of copyrighted works in the practice of teaching and learning. They frequently use popular culture, mass media, digital media, or other artifacts that are not traditionally defined as “educational media.” In part because of several well-publicized cases in which severe penalties have been directed at individuals involved in file-sharing and because of the rise of licensed online multimedia products marketed directly to schools, a climate of fear about potential liability concerning the unlicensed use of copyrighted materials in education has been increasing among educators in higher education and K-12 schools. In response, media literacy educators in the United States are asserting their fair use rights. This paper describes the development of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which was created to articulate the consensus that exists among educators about the application of fair use to the practice of media literacy education. Thi...

WHAT PURPOSE DOES ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM SERVE?' Whom is it for? Is it for scientists, television audiences, its subjects? Can there be overlaps or common goals? This is the prickly question underlying much ethnographic film production. It is routinely addressed in practice more than in theory, in part because of the economics of filmmaking. Anthropologists have not found funding either to build filmmaking into fieldwork or to establish a rigorous set of professional standards, although anthropologists such as Jay Ruby have sturdily maintained that they should. At the same time, documentary practice has evolved, divorced from theoretical concerns about scientific accuracy, although documentarians have often capitalized on claims to science (Winston). Ethnographic film and visual anthropology have areas of overlap but also occupy different domains. Visual anthropologists, concerned with the politics of representation as well as the challenge of communicating the lived experience of distinct cultures, have struggled from the first generation of anthropology to define an arena within anthropological practice. They have asked questions about the ethics and implications of formal choices in photography, film, and video. They have grappled with the nature of social scientific claims made for their observations and their moral obligations to their subjects. Some of those people have also been filmmakers. Meanwhile, many filmmakers with no formal training whatsoever claim the mantle of the term "ethnographic film," so long as there is a cross-cultural aspect to the subject matter. Some of those people are thoughtful and reflective about their formal choices, relationships with subjects, and role in public. Many of them work without much reflection on the nature of the relationships they will establish between filmmaker and subject and filmmaker and audience. Even when traditional subjects turn into makers, as in the University of Washington's Native Voices program, it is not necessarily integrated with anthropology; Native Voices is a communications department project. Most filmmakers producing outside a purely academic environment are typically chained to production modes that respond to television markets; this ensures that they will adopt formal strategies that stay within the acceptable range for broadcast. Much work produced for the educational marketplace observes the same conventions. Teachers regularly use work that was designed considering the imperatives of commercial or quasi-commercial television markets. Inevitably, both anthropologists (including those trained in visual anthropology and those not) and professional filmmakers have used the term "ethnographic film" to describe their work. The line between the work of social scientists and the work of professional filmmakers is blurry in the eyes of the viewing public. An example is the film The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003). Set in Mongolia, the film was crafted from a fictional script devised by Mongolian and Italian coproducers, starring non-actors who were nonetheless cast in their roles and representing the nomadic community as far more isolated than the salt trade it participates in permits it to be, but it was widely reported as an authentic rendering of Mongolian daily life. Any documentary form grapples with the core problem of truthfulness-not only whether any particular fact is correct, not only whether a portrayal is a fair one and set properly in context, but also to whom and why it is relevant. Ethnographic film raises this question acutely because the term itself implies otherness-that ethnographic film is a look from outside a culture, giving the audience a glimpse inside it. This claim to provide a privileged gaze heightens the usual ethical questions of documentary. Making the ethical and epistemological questions even more pointed is the common situation in which the subjects of an ethnographic film are members of cultural groups with less power in society and media than the filmmaker. …

M edia critic Pat Aufderheide and film distributor Debra Zimmerman have known each other for almost two decades through the world of independent filmmaking. Since 1983, Zimmerman has been executive director of Women Make Movies (WMM), the foremost distributor of women’s films made in the United States and abroad to theaters, television, schools, and community organizations. Aufderheide, a noted critic and scholar, focuses on independent media and media policy. In this conversation, held at the International Documentary Film festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November 2002, Zimmerman and Aufderheide talk about the cultural production and circulation of women’s films and the relationships among women’s movements, women’s filmmaking and aesthetics, and viewing publics. Pat Aufderheide (PA): How did you get involved in women’s films? Debra Zimmerman (DZ): Well, I am not sure, but I do remember the day I decided to become involved with Women Make Movies. Alice Fix, my women’s studies professor at the State University College in New Paltz, New York, encouraged me to go to a Women’s Weekend in 1977. Ariel Dougherty, the founder of WMM in 1972, and Carol Clement, an early WMM member, were screening a film called Musereel (1975) in a barn. I remember sitting at the screening, surrounded by women, and thinking that I had never had this experience before—I had never seen my experiences reflected back to me on film. It was so powerful that I stopped then and said, “This is what I want to do. I want to feel this way all the time.” I don’t think that anyone can overestimate how important it is to have that experience. Even now, when I attend screenings of our

This roundtable discussion draws together researchers with an interest of overcoming purely juridical treatment of piracy in their work. Christopher Kelty and Gabriella Coleman consider the aspects of cyberculture, which conflictually engage with intellectual property rights, through various communities of technology practice, including hackers. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s work on fair use addresses the growing opportunities for creators in the United States to utilize the tradition in their creative fields. Jonas Andersson Schwarz and Patrick Burkart, co-editors of this special issue, have researched user motivations and political activism around copyright and software patent reforms, partially explaining the emergence of dozens of European Pirate Parties, beginning with the Swedish Pirates in 2006.

Telecommunications reform is now a global phenomenon, with privatization and usaional competition challenging traditional communications policies. Such reforms inevitably reflect and contribute to constructing new relationships between state, industry and citizenry. In Brazil, an industrial power where telecommunications is seen as critical to development, policy reform was initiated with multichannel television. The process of shaping cable television legislation showcased civic activists' struggle to establish a role for the Brazilian public in the policy process. This was a struggle that involved reconceptualizing the public itself, often invoking Habermas, and striking new and sometimes improbable alliances.

The documentary genre in film makes distinctive claims to honesty and truth. While filmmakers do not promise objectivity and balance, and while they all recognize that all expression is crafted and not a simple mirror of reality, the form is defined by its claim to say something honestly about something that really happened. Filmmakers’ ethical judgments implicitly or explicitly revolve around this defining feature of the genre. (Aufderheide, 2007)This article discusses the results of a study on how documentary filmmakers in the U.S. perceive what common ethical challenges are, and how these filmmakers commonly address those challenges in the absence of a formally articulated code of ethics or shared institutional regulations. Ethics is considered as the application of general moral precepts within professional practice.

Online social networks have made visible what was always true: the self is endlessly constructed with a constant stream of bits of culture that people use both to shape experience and relationships. People communicate with each other traveling along lines of taste and affection for shared and shareable culture. Online social networks facilitate and reinforce the building of one’s personal social networks, which locate you in the world and to yourself. Take Kira’s twenty-sixth birthday party. Kira and her twenty-something friends met at a bar in downtown Washington, D.C., to get a list of absurd tasks (jump in a fountain; hug 10 strangers; do a group dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller;” take a picture of the number 26 somewhere). They then headed off in teams to accomplish those tasks, recorded them faithfully on their cameras and cell phones, and came back to the bar to recount their achievements and peer onto each other’s screens. Then they went home to post their recordings on Facebook, where their friends are now commenting and forwarding to others. Their online selves were completely integrated with their face-to-face selves. Meanwhile, Kira’s friend Alison (who won Kira’s scavenger hunt, as you can find out on her Facebook page) found out about Keyboard Cat-an online video meme-from friends on Facebook. Or maybe it was some IM chat, or an email-she doesn’t remember, really. Alison was puzzled at first, but quickly got the idea. Video of a real cat playing (thanks to an unseen master) the piano gets inserted into some piece of bad or over-the-top television. For instance, in “Play Haley Off, Keyboard Cat,” in a segment from the TV show, Walker, Texas Ranger, a young boy tells Walker’s friends that he knows he has AIDS. Suddenly, the keyboarding cat video is interpolated. Similarly, a pretty announcer for some international TV program suddenly vomits on screen-and there’s the keyboarding cat. So every time Alison sees a particularly good keyboard cat, she posts it on her Facebook page. Now that her friends know the keyboard cat is on her radar, they’re scouting for her too. Keyboard cat is currency in her social network.

The historical ambiguities over what makes U. S. public television public were foregrounded in the 1988 creation of the Independent Television Serivce. This article analyzes those historical ambiguities in relation to the concept of the public sphere, a social realm separate from economic and state interests. It proposes that public television's survival depends on its becoming an electronic space within the public sphere.