Documents

Reclaiming Fair Use: How To Put Balance Back In Copyright

Out Now: Reclaiming Fair Use -- a book that empowers creators of all kinds. Profs. Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media, and Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law in the Washington College of Law at American University, urge a robust embrace of a principle long-embedded in copyright law, but too often poorly understood—fair use.

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Modeling Policy for New Public Service Media Networks

An article in the Fall 2010 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology by Center for Social Media Research Fellow Ellen Goodman and researcher Anne H. Chen explores new policy structures for networked public media.

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24harvjltech111.pdf

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Documents

Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics

Public broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, and network newscasts have all played a central role in our democracy, informing citizens and guiding public conversation. But the top-down dissemination technologies that supported them are being supplanted by an open, many-to-many networked media environment. What platforms, standards, and practices will replace or transform legacy public media?

This white paper lays out an expanded vision for “public media 2.0” that places engaged publics at its core, showcasing innovative experiments from its “first two minutes,” and revealing related trends, stakeholders, and policies. Public media 2.0 may look and function differently, but it will share the same goals as the projects that preceded it: educating, informing, and mobilizing its users.

Multiplatform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature of truly democratic public life from here on in. And it’ll be media both for and by the public. The grassroots mobilization around the 2008 electoral campaign is just one signal of how digital tools for making and sharing media open up new opportunities for civic engagement.

But public media 2.0 won’t happen by accident, or for free. The same bottom-line logic that runs media today will run tomorrow’s media as well. If we’re going to have media for vibrant democratic culture, we have to plan for it, try it out, show people that it matters, and build new constituencies to invest in it.

The first and crucial step is to embrace the participatory—the feature that has also been most disruptive of current media models. We also need standards and metrics to define truly meaningful participation in media for public life. And we need policies, initiatives, and sustainable financial models that can turn today’s assets and experiments into tomorrow’s tried-and-true public media.

Public media stakeholders, especially such trusted institutions as public broadcasting, need to take leadership in creating a true public investment in public media 2.0.

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Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work

This study provides a map of perceived ethical challenges that documentary filmmakers—directors and producer-directors—in the United States identify in the practice of their craft. It summarizes the results of 45 long-form interviews in which filmmakers were asked simply to describe recent ethical challenges that surfaced in their work. This baseline research is necessary to begin any inquiry into ethical standards because the field has not yet articulated ethical standards specific to documentary. These interviews demonstrate, indeed, a need for a more public and focused conversation about ethics before any standards emerging from shared experience and values can be articulated.This study provides a map of perceived ethical challenges that documentary filmmakers—directors and producer-directors—in the United States identify in the practice of their craft. It summarizes the results of 45 long-form interviews in which filmmakers were asked simply to describe recent ethical challenges that surfaced in their work. This baseline research is necessary to begin any inquiry into ethical standards because the field has not yet articulated ethical standards specific to documentary. These interviews demonstrate, indeed, a need for a more public and focused conversation about ethics before any standards emerging from shared experience and values can be articulated.

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The War Tapes

Questions

Where are the publics? Are there particular "home front" publics?

To what extent does The War Tapes organize publics different from those of other Iraq war or war on terror films?

Do the issues raised by The War Tapes organize distinctive publics? Are the publics organized into pro-war and anti-war clusters, or does the film begin another discussion related to the war in Iraq and the war on terror?

Does the film festival change or amplify the conversation about the issues raised in the film?

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War_tapes_maps.pdf

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