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This article examines how US community media organisations anchored to public, educational and government (PEG) cable channels facilitated community resilience during the 2020 pandemic. We find evi...

The Digital Future Coalition (1996–2002) was an unprecedented public interest coalition on internet and copyright policy with much fartherranging effects than has been recognized previousl...

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...

Copyright policy is inextricably entangled with the work of academic researchers on Internet culture. This paper examines a new U.S. law, the CASE Act, which creates a new venue for resolving copyright disputes for up to $30,000. We discuss the implications of such a venue for U.S.-based internet studies research.

This study examines the legislative evolution of Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, a widely discussed and frequently misunderstood dimension of American telecommunications policy that provides a “safe harbor” provisionally shielding internet companies from liability for law-breaking content published by third parties who use their platforms and networks. Though this provision originated in the mid-1990s as an effort to minimize the legal and economic risks facing fledgling internet startups, we argue that efforts to reform it during the Trump era reflected an unprecedented transformation of an arcane policy point into a highly public subject for “messaging bills” intended principally to signal political loyalty to the president.

This study tracks changes in behavior and attitude among visual arts professionals after the development of a code of best practices in the copyright doctrine of fair use. A survey of 2,400 professionals fielded only months after its publication demonstrated broad awareness of the code, informing practice and inspiring efforts to spread awareness. The greatest degree of awareness and change was among editors, several of whose publications altered their copyright policies. Professional and social networks were critical to spreading awareness. Despite a continuing lack of confidence in interpreting the law among individual professionals, the existence of a code contributed to significant change in norms and practices via institutional adoption. This study demonstrates that codes of best practices can affect field behavior, but that change depends on publicity, formal education, continuing support for early adopters, and institutional policy changes.

Content moderation has exploded as a policy, advocacy, and public concern. But these debates still tend to be driven by high-profile incidents and to focus on the largest, US based platforms. In order to contribute to informed policymaking, scholarship in this area needs to recognise that moderation is an expansive socio-technical phenomenon, which functions in many contexts and takes many forms. Expanding the discussion also changes how we assess the array of proposed policy solutions meant to improve content moderation. Here, nine content moderation scholars working in critical internet studies propose how to expand research on content moderation, with implications for policy.

The Digital Future Coalition (1996-2002), was an unprecedented public interest coalition on Internet and copyright policy, with much farther-ranging effects than has been recognized previously. Uniting commercial and noncommercial stakeholders to push back against IP maximalism on the nascent Internet, it altered both treaty and legislative language, blocked U.S. copyright protection for databases, enhanced popular engagement with fair use and set the stage for the “Right to Repair” movement. This historical research was accomplished primarily by interviewing representatives of the DFC and opposing groups, as well as one ex-government official, and by consulting a hitherto untapped, private archive of documents relevant to the history of the DFC. We consider our topic within contexts in three areas: the history of the formation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA;) public interest coalition characteristics in communication; and the political roles of coalitions. In this article, we accept the assessment of the DMCA as legislation that both foreclosed options for the Internet’s development and created an enduring regime to protect copyright monopolies on the Internet. However, we argue that a closer look at the DFC’s actions, goals and long-range effects can reposition that coalition productively in the history. Such repositioning helps to understand how different the DMCA today is from the originally-proposed policy and the implications of those differences. Finally a detailed accounting of the DFC’s dynamics and tactics may prove instructive in assessing the efficacy of contemporary information activist groups.

Podcasting has thrived since its popularization in 2004 as a bastion for amateur media production. Over the past ten years, however, entrepreneurs and legacy media companies have rapidly expanded their interests in podcasting, bringing with them professional standards and the logics of capital. Breakout hits such as 2014’s Serial (with nearly 40 million downloads) and This American Life have demonstrated to both programmers and advertisers the potential for podcasting to emerge as a commercially viable media industry (O’Connell, 2015). According to a recent nationwide survey by Edison Research (2019), an estimated 90 million listeners reported having listened to a podcast in the previous month. Despite the medium’s homespun, DIY roots, this dramatic expansion of the podcast audience and interest from legacy media has begun to transform it “from a do-it-yourself, amateur niche medium into a commercial mass medium” (Bonini, 2015, p. 27). This proposed panel aims to explore the transitions currently underway in podcasting. Specifically, each of the papers on this panel address in some way the process of formalization, or the process by which “media systems become progressively more rationalized, consolidated and financially transparent” (Lobato &Thomas, 2015, p. 27). Formalization is not a monolithic process, but rather one that is responsive to existing institutional, regulatory, and cultural structures. It is also historically contingent. The first paper, entitled “Podcasting as a cultural form between old and new media” utilizes a historical lens to link the current trajectory of the medium’s development to the development and domestication of radio in the 1920s as well as the rise of online streaming services in the 21st Century. In particular, this paper situates podcasting in the context of these earlier technologies, arguing that the medium is best understood as a complex interplay between networks of market actors. This complex interplay of actors is explored in more detail by papers 2 and 3. In the second paper, entitled “Formalising the informal: BBC commissions and the shape of podcasts,” the author explores the powerful role of the BBC in providing an institutional and creative framework for podcasting production via its BBC Sounds online radio platform. Through the efforts of this venerable public service broadcaster to reach new audiences by developing podcast content specific to this platform, this paper argues that the medium’s amateur and informal ethos stands to be re-shaped. The third paper, entitled “Protecting public podcasting: Are U.S. news, public affairs, and learning podcasts at risk?”, takes a macro-level view of the formalization process, focusing on podcasts within the U.S. context. Nothing that the most popular podcasts in the U.S. are either learning or information-oriented, this paper argues that the podcast ecosystem fulfills an important public service function. The introduction of platform services like Spotify as power players in podcast distribution, coupled with the rise of advertising as a means of monetization, presents new risks for perpetuation of the medium as an aural public service resource. The fourth paper expands the arguments surrounding podcast formalization by exploring the introduction of market information regimes within the medium. Specifically, this paper explores the development of audience metrics for podcasting, beginning in the mid-2000’s. This paper makes clear that powerful industry players such as Apple and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are quickly standardizing the measurement of podcast audiences. These standards create a more transparent market for advertisers, but in so doing they also shift the focus away from the unique nature of podcast content and move it toward notions of audience size. This has the potential to move the medium further away from its amateur roots. Finally, the fifth paper on the panel attempts to reframe the formalization debate by pulling the discussion away from the confining binaries of utopian or dystopian narratives. Instead, this paper situates podcasting within a much broader context by leveraging Don Idhe’s phenomenological philosophy of technology to “speculate on a potential future of reified oral/aural meditation.” This paper considers the nature of the medium itself as a unique “techno-sonic experience”. Here, podcasting is not considered as a medium being shaped by the formalization efforts of institutions or legacy forms of media. Instead, podcasting emerges as a transformational technology that promises a new era of sound integration.

The kind and extent of exceptions and limitations to copyright monopolies are a major focus of copyright reform discussion worldwide. The debate is often portrayed as pitting the interests of creators against users. Australian copyright law features narrow and limited exceptions. Australian creators benefit from copyright monopolies; but do they suffer any costs for lack of flexible exceptions? A national survey of creators showed that they experience significant costs in time and money in making work; avoid or abandon projects because of copyright problems; and avoid developing ideas for projects that involve use of third-party copyrighted materials. These costs have previously been uncalculated and not included in national policy debate. The results provide information not only for the Australian context but for policy discussion internationally.

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...

Where are diverse makers and subjects most likely to be found in U.S. TV documentary? This study compares commercial and public TV series, and also anthology formats (“authorial” series) and executive-produced formats. A content analysis for characters and makers showed that public TV authorial series are more diverse than either commercial or other public TV series. Executive-produced public TV does not show consistent commitment to diversity. Independent documentaries have diversity value both in commercial and public TV settings.

The Digital Future Coalition (1996-2002) was an unprecedented public interest coalition on Internet and copyright policy with much farther-ranging effects than has been recognized previously. Uniting commercial and noncommercial stakeholders to push back against intellectual property maximalism on the nascent Internet, it altered both treaty and legislative language, entered a trope—“balance”—into national discourse on copyright policy, blocked U.S. copyright protection for databases, enhanced popular engagement with fair use, and set the stage for the “Right to Repair” movement. This historical research was accomplished primarily by interviewing representatives of the Digital Future Coalition (DFC) and opposing groups, as well as one ex-official, and by consulting a hitherto untapped, private archive of documents relevant to the prehistory and 1996-2002 history of the DFC.

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.

Public TV has played a crucial role in shaping opportunities for documentary, and one of its units, the Independent Television Service (ITVS), has since 1989 played an important but largely unsung role in a generation of social-issue, point-of-view documentaries in the U.S. It is an unlikely creation, the product of activist efforts by documentarians who often found themselves excluded in post-1967 public broadcasting. It is an even more unlikely success, as an organization largely funded with tax dollars by the entity that documentarians protested against in its creation — Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In its thirty years, it has co-produced dozens of documentaries a year with independents and found public TV distribution for them. It has been not only incubator but broker between sometimes-obstreperous or even oppositional filmmakers and always-cautious station programmers and PBS. ITVS has evolved in playing this role, becoming a leading support and gateway to broadcasting for the kind of U.S. documentary that is most difficult to make in commercial environments: the independent, point-of-view work on issues of public importance. Understanding how ITVS has shaped opportunities for filmmakers illuminates evolution in form, as well as helping to explain the limits on public affairs programming in the distribution service that reach the greatest number of Americans. Finally, understanding ITVS’ often-hidden contribution demonstrates the importance of focusing on cultural production in understanding genre.

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.

A media literate person— and everyone should have the opportunity to become one— can decode, evaluate, analyze, and produce both print and electronic media. The fundamental objective of media literacy is critical autonomy in relationship to all media. Emphases in media literacy training range widely, including informed citizenship, aesthetic appreciation and expression, social advocacy, self-esteem, and consumer competence. Some may use media literacy as a vehicle to understand the economic infrastructure of mass media, as a key element in the social construction of public knowledge. It is ironic and also understandable that the United States is the premier producer of international mass media, but that media literacy education is only beginning in this country. In Ontario, Canada, teachers built on English and Australian media literacy programs and practices, as well as on academic work in cultural studies. Germany’s media education is beset with the usual limitations of a voluntary program, including poor teacher preparedness.

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, based on a survey of 489 documentary filmmakers, is a case study in copyright policy in and through practice. It assesses the changes in documentary production practice around clearance of copyrighted material since the creation of the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in fair use in 2005. Fair use, an exotic and occasional feature of documentary film in 2004, has become well-known and commonly employed. Creative options for filmmakers concerning use of third-party material have dramatically improved with changes in norms after the issuing of the Statement. Attitudes about fair use are strongly associated with free expression and creative opportunity, and vary with experience. Where filmmakers have changed work because of copyright concerns, they themselves rather than any gatekeeper have made the decision to do so. Where change is associated with fair use, risk is a common concern. Newer filmmakers are more likely to support use of copyrighted material to make new work, but less likely to know about fair use, and also more likely to have experienced takedowns online. Both education about and experience with fair use appear to have an effect on practice. Filmmakers continue to lack reliable information on the actual risk landscape, and about fair use on digital platforms.

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.

Recent films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., and Sicko have generated attention to how documentaries can shape debates over social issues and policy questio...

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. …

Librarians wanting to use digital affordances for their patron’s and public benefit have increasingly found themselves frustrated by copyright law designed for a pre-digital era. In the U.S., this frustration has driven the nation’s most prestigious library group, the Association of Research Libraries, to explore the utility of the major exception to copyright monopoly rights, fair use, in order to accomplish basic curation and collection goals in a digital era. The ARL’s efforts to clarify how libraries can employ fair use has resulted in sometimes-dramatic changes in how work is done, and has permitted innovation at some universities. Its approach demonstrates the power of consensus in a professional field to permit innovation within the law.

American documentaries about Iraq are fascinating from many perspectives, but they matter to us all now because they are active interventions in public life, on a topic that concerns each American in some way. They fit squarely into a core expectation about documentaries: that they will be about something timely and important. They have arrived at a moment when political documentary is growing rapidly in popularity. For instance, a Pew survey after the 2004 national election (see http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=147) reported that 31% of American adults said they had seen a political documentary relating to the campaign or the candidates. They also fit squarely into an expectation about democracy and public life: that it is fed by the provision of information for public knowledge and action. By public, we mean here a group of people mobilized by their common knowledge of common problems, as American philosopher John Dewey used the term in his landmark 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems. Publics, informal networks of people linked by common concerns, are formed by communication with each other about these problems, and their communication is fed by media provision. They create public spheres, to use a term given stature by the work of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Publics are not, in this sense, unitary blocs under the rubric of a nation state or society, but, rather, groups constituted informally around issues or problems. Publics around the issues of the Iraq War may be national (federal taxpayers), regional (people represented by their National Guards), local (residents of a neighborhood whose resources are changed by the war), or issue-specific (families of poorly-provisioned soldiers). Iraq documentaries have rushed in-and by now there are dozens, with more than a score distributed-to fill gaps in mainstream media coverage of Iraq. They provide explanations of "why we are in Iraq" if there are no weapons of mass destruction and there never were. They provide a chronicle of the actual experience of combat. They provide a window into the daily lives of Iraqis. Some have been designed to enlighten and inform, others to mobilize. All of them have both exemplified and played a role in the growing public disillusionment with the war, with the regimes that have led the war, and with the quality and process of providing systems for both supplies and people to wage the war. Thus, these documentaries are not only movies about the Iraq War, they are also part of a process of constituting a public around the issues of the war. How can we understand them specifically in their role as agents of the construction of publics? Different kinds of work approach and even define the problem differently, with different implications for the nature of public engagement. Here, three approaches are addressed: essays about the legitimacy and logic of the war; films about soldiers' experiences; and films about the Iraqi experience of war. Why-We-Are-in-Iraq Docs These are essay films that analyze and extrapolate motives for the U.S. government's decision to invade Iraq. They include the film that started the current trend, Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, US, 2004); Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, US, 2005); Iraq for Sale (Brave New Films, US, 2006); and Shocking and Awful (Deep Dish TV, US, 2005). In terms of constructing publics, all of Michael Moore's work is a fascinating exercise in tension. The charged polarity in his films is really between the victims and the powerful. Moore's projects portray a world divided between the atomized and downtrodden, and the callously rich and powerful. He acts, in all his films, as the representative of the people who do not have agency, the victims, and he uses the weapons of the weak-laughter, ridicule, shame-to point fingers at the powerful. This is a different project from invoking agency- calling on people to assume the power they have-and it is also extremely entertaining. …