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News from the Future of Public Media
Fair Use at SXSW
email discuss Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Mar 18, 2010 at 3:37 PM
When The People vs. George Lucas’ Kerry Roy mentioned the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use from the stage, I whooped. I couldn’t help it—it was the first time I’d heard the statement acknowledged in that setting. But Roy wasn’t the only filmmaker who told me that the Statement was an essential tool of production these days; it was a routine mention in my hallway conversations with filmmakers. And I participated in two panels where that fact was also boldly showcased.
In Remix Goes Mainstream: Making Mashups Pay lawyer Michael Donaldson noted that his firm now works on hundreds of fair uses each week, and that recent festival favorites such as Bhutto and GasLand heavily depended on them. The visuals in Moral Kombat, a critical film about video games, were almost entirely video game scenes, all fairly used. Thomas Allen Harris described how fair use fuels his current project, compiling stories from scrapbooks. Jonathan McIntosh, maker of the remix hit Buffy v. Edward, employs fair use to make his non-commercial, political work. (The attention to his work brings him jobs, though, and even got him his San Francisco apartment.) Finally, Paula LeDieu described the vast resources of the British Film Institute’s archives—most of it unusable without employing some limitation or exception to copyright, such as fair use or fair dealing.
On the interactive side, University of California Berkeley law professor Jason Schultz organized a game show called “Parody Home Companion: DIY Fair Use”. Although Byron Hurt got rained out, the rest of us (plus pinch-hitter Michael Donaldson) showed film clips and online video remixes, got the audience to vote, and some lucky people got the chance to get Stanford law professor Julie Ahrens’ voice on their home answering machine. It seems like for every grateful filmmaker, there are ten more (and a lot of developers too) who need to learn their fair use rights.