http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/ The Center for Social Media showcases and analyzes strategies to use media as creative tools for public knowledge and action. It focuses on social documentaries for civil society and democracy, and on the public media environment that supports them. The Center is part of the School of Communication at American University. en-us socialmedia@american.edu Copyright 2008 2008-05-11T01:34:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/mapping_ugc_ii/ Here's the latest in a series of media maps we're featuring in the run up to the June 17 conference, Beyond Broadcast: Mapping Public Media: Linking to more than 700 sites, this map from the Knight Citizen News Network demonstrates the boom in user-generated online community news. From mtpolitics.net ("Conservative views on the goings-on in Montana"), to Blog San Diego ("Music, art and politics from California"), to MyMaineToday (a network of 470 town blogs that encourages residents to post news, events and photos), the sites mingle the personal and the public in ways that might make traditional newspaper editors wince. They'll have to get used to it--and the Citizen News Network can help. Offering how-tos and research on this growing… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-05-11T01:34:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/mapping_ugc_ii http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/ugc_uses_hollywood_archetypes_to_support_obama/ This election season has seen a surge of commentary from the User Generated Content community, and Obama supporters have taken to comparing him to Hollywood hero archetypes. Below are some great examples of pieces that rely on the principles of fair use for their commentary in the political sphere. Here is a video titled "The Empire Strikes Baracky." This video likens Obama to Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo, and positions Hillary Clinton as what is often considered to be the most evil character in film history, Darth Vader. The video attempts to draw a comparison in the story lines in the Empire Strikes Back to the evolving plot in the Democratic party. "The Empire Strikes Baracky" is largely comprised of… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-05-05T15:10:01-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/ugc_uses_hollywood_archetypes_to_support_obama http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/crowdsourcing_censorship/ Annalee Newitz--tech reporter and editor of a hot new sci-fi blog io9--has an interesting column up on AlterNet titled User-Generated Censorship. She writes: Here's how it works: let's say you're a community activist who has some pretty vehement opinions about your city government. You go to Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, and create a free blog called Why the Municipal Government in Crappy City Sucks. Of course, a bunch of people in Crappy City disagree with you -- and maybe even hate you personally. So instead of making mean comments on your blog, they decide to shut it down. At the top of your Blogger blog, there is a little button that says "flag this blog." When somebody hits… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-05-03T14:31:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/crowdsourcing_censorship http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/fair_use_question_may/ QUESTION: Dear CSM, my little documentary that I'm producing -- which of course I hope will be a big documentary -- is using a montage of several book jackets to illustrate the fact that science and spirituality are becoming more related than they have been -- books like "The Tao of Physics." The rigmarole to get clearances from the publishers is daunting and I wonder if it is necessary. There is nothing negative being said about the books, and in the world of logic one would thing that showing the jackets could only benefit sales. Do I still, for the publishers or for my own evidence that I have clearances for the sake of making a sale, have to get… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-05-01T17:43:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use_question_may http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/innovation_in_focus_digital_election_link_tvs_dear_american_voter/ Link TV’s new “Dear American Voter” project is using digital platforms to give the global community a voice in the upcoming election, an event that will shift the policies and direction of the entire world. Individuals can upload their video “letters” to American citizens about how they would vote in the election and why, how American policies have affected their lives, and what they think the priorities for the new Administration should be. “Dear American Voter” is a vivid example of how participatory digital media can bridge communities on a global level and provide a forum for diverse voices and opinions on history-changing events and issues. Viewers can watch videos by region (a few examples include the Americas, Africa, and… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-05-01T17:28:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/innovation_in_focus_digital_election_link_tvs_dear_american_voter http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/nfb/ What difference does it make to have government funding for public media? Look at Canada, where the National Film Board (NFB) for more than 60 years has produced films that engage publics on national and cultural issues. The NFB shone at the HotDocs documentary film festival, which every April in Toronto showcases the latest Canadian work, as well as international production. My personal favorite of all the films I saw at HotDocs was an NFB production: Mohawk filmmaker Tracey Deer’s Club Native. Tracey Deer lives in a small Mohawk community where group membership is decided by blood kinship. That wasn’t good news for her sister, who fell in love with a non-Mohawk, and whose children will now not be eligible… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-30T18:01:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/nfb http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/mapping_user_generated_media_part_i_beyond_red_and_blue/ This is the latest post in our series featuring maps of the media landscape, which leads up to the June 17 conference, Beyond Broadcast: Mapping Public Media. (Note: Today is the last day to register at the earlybird rate!). One of the trends we're examining at the conference is the rise of data visualization tools for examining online media content and networked publics. We began this research in conjunction with the Amsterdam-based Govcom.org Foundation, and have continued to explore other visualization and mapping approaches. The Presidential Watch 08 site provides an example of what has become a common impulse: mapping user-generated media along partisan lines: I spoke with Anthony Hamelle of Linkfluence, the creators of this visualization. Hamelle will be… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-30T15:53:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/mapping_user_generated_media_part_i_beyond_red_and_blue http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/leo_eaton/ Our good friend Leo Eaton, a veteran public affairs and public broadcasting producer, writes in his annual letter to the field about how he sees the role of the documentarian. He also talks about the role of public broadcasting, and shares a revealing inside story that shows how embattled the notion of civil discourse on television is: I was series producer for the epic PBS current-affairs series America at a Crossroads that took over an entire week of prime-time programming (12 hours) back in April of last year. In spite of all the political controversy surrounding the gestation of a series whose task was to examine America’s role in the world 5 years after 9/11, the series was a great… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-29T19:47:01-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/leo_eaton http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/not_so_profitable/ Arts Engine executive director Katy Chevigny, a leader in the field of documentary production (and whose timely and watchable film Election Day is part of the stunning summer season on public television series P.O.V., has written a thought-provoking blog entry. She notes that some documentaries are hugely popular (An Inconvenient Truth) and others are highly targeted (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price). But what happens to the “smaller or artier documentary”? Katy observes that: It's more difficult to raise the funds or to make the argument that an audience will want to see it. Films like the Maysles' Salesman (about a bunch of nobodies doing a tedious job) or Marlon Riggs' Black Is...Black Ain't (political, but not advancing a… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-29T13:25:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/not_so_profitable http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/frame_grabs/ For the last 15 years, film scholars have been asserting their fair use rights to reproduce stills and frame grabs of films and videos they discuss in their work. They’ve been helped by a clear statement of their rights created by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Now, Kristin Thompson, who as president of SCMS in 1993 guided the creation of that statement, has assessed in her blog what has happened since. The news is all good: Scholars have used their rights, there have been no lawsuits, and related case law (especially the Bill Graham Archives case) has reinforced scholars’ claims. News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-29T13:22:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/frame_grabs http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/2008hotdocs/ At HotDocs on April 21, an international panel showcased the importance of exercising the balancing features of copyright, even in countries where fair use does not exist. Canadian filmmaker Brett Gaylor, who’s making a film called Basement Tapes: The Making of a Pirate Movie, explained how he’s encouraging others to contribute material to his “Open Source Cinema” project. Gaylor argues that copyright understanding constricts creativity. His film in progress exposes the enormous creativity unleashed in mashups, remixes, and sampling. It uses the balancing features of Canadian copyright law, called fair dealing, to display such work legally within the film, which is destined for legal release in Canada. Italian filmmaker Marco Visalberghi, vice-president of the Italian filmmakers’ organization Doc/It, spoke about… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-28T20:31:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/2008hotdocs http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/mapping_the_primaries_public_media_style/ This is the latest in a series of media maps I'm examining between now and our June 17 Beyond Broadcast conference. With the last of the intra-Democratic debates now over, all eyes are on the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania. Public broadcasting outlets have banded together to share news and information about the primaries through this nifty interactive map: The map provides primary-related news feeds from both national and local public broadcasting sources. It ticks off the number of delegates at stake, and includes a tracker to keep tabs on those pesky superdelegates. County-by-county results are available (the data is from AP), as are relevant political facts for each state. The map also doubles as a state-by-state guide to public… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-17T21:56:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/mapping_the_primaries_public_media_style http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/political_videos_utilizing_fair_use/ The usage of viral videos as a form of public media has grown rapidly in recent years, and political videos are no exception. During this evolution, political videos have begun quoting each other, very often utilizing fair use principles in order to provide commentary about other political commentators. Take for example “Hillary 2.0.” This video by Hugh Atkin adopts the format of videos by the group Anonymous (another fascinating internet emergence – read this post from Henry Jenkins’ blog to learn more about it). It suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is a machine that, prompted by the success of videos supporting Barack Obama, is studying popular viral videos as a way of infiltrating the consciousness of voters. This video suggests… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-14T13:11:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/political_videos_utilizing_fair_use http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/media_mergers/ This week's entry in our ongoing Atlas of Media Maps series comes to us from Mother Jones magazine. Titled "And then there were eight: 25 years of media mergers, from GE-NBC to Google-YouTube," it's now more than a year old. But it effectively tells the story of a perpetual trend: the ever-increasing consolidation of media ownership. This map builds on previous media consolidation mapping efforts, like The Nation's 2006 map of the National Entertainment State. Such visualizations of the communications landscape have served as tools in the media reform movement, championed by advocates such as the Consumers Union, and have contributed to ongoing discussions about the degradation of local news, the rise of violence on television, and the commercialization of… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-11T15:13:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/media_mergers http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/netizenship/ Are we headed backwards, to a media world that looks more like cable than the Internet? For Jonathan Zittrain, the iPhone is the enemy, Wikipedia is our friend, and our laptops are battle zones in a new war. By the time you’re done reading The Future of the Internet--and How to Stop It (Yale University Press), you’ll be looking at that iPhone with suspicion as well. Zittrain argues that the key to the astounding creativity in the high-tech digital environment in the last two decades is the relatively open nature of the PC, combined with the relatively open nature of the Internet. The fact that users can reprogram the PC—install, even write new software for it, mix, match and create… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-09T14:19:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/netizenship http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/docaviv/ The highlight of my trip to the high-energy, high-touch DocAviv Documentary Film Festival was an open workshop on copyright and documentary, attended by about 35 filmmakers and a few lawyers. It shouldn’t have been surprising, but Israeli documentary filmmakers are just as frustrated and confused as U.S. makers used to be about what copyrighted material they must license and what they can just use. They’re just as eager to figure it out, and they’ve suddenly become poster children for fair use outside the U.S. Israeli law was just changed to incorporate U.S.-style fair use. “We don’t yet know how courts will interpret the law,” said leading entertainment attorney Tony Greenman. “But there is far more flexibility than there ever was… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-09T14:05:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/docaviv http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/avian_flu_watch_on_flickr/ A new watch pool on Flickr allows the public to follow the Avian Flu pandemic and to share information and news through images. The project is an example of the growing role that new web 2.0 tools hold in informing the public on important news from around the globe. Our research and focus on public media here at the Center for Social Media is important in understanding how society is evolving in its usage of media for public knowledge and action. You can read more about this in our Public Media FAQ. You can view the pool at http://flickr.com/groups/influenza/pool/ News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-04T17:15:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/avian_flu_watch_on_flickr http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/ica_open/ On May 22, the Center for Social Media will be sponsoring a preconference as part of the International Communication Associations yearly conference. It will build upon the Center for Social Media’s Mapping Public Media project, directed by Jessica Clark. Clark heads up CSM's Future of Public Media project, funded by the Ford Foundation. The preconference will showcase cross-disciplinary perspectives and conclude with discussion of a research agenda on public media (click here to read our public media FAQ) in a participatory digital era of communication. Please join us for this exciting event! International Communication Association Preconference: Remapping Public Media Thursday, May 22, 8:00-4:30 Registration deadline: May 3 CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION INFORMATION Description: As digital innovations open up new opportunities… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-04T16:32:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/ica_open http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/greenwald/ By Laurie Moy, Graduate Student, American University, School of Communication, International Media Program For most directors, going from Hollywood to YouTube would be a demotion. But for Robert Greenwald the move from the silver screen to the computer screen was part of a “personal transformation.” Speaking at the Center for American Progress’s Internet Advocacy Roundtable, Greenwald explained how he has come to embrace “alternative distribution.” And it has embraced him. His films had had over 43 million views, and it is estimated that one of his online films is seen every 2 seconds. So what’s the secret to his success? Good storytelling is key, he says. Especially with the shorts – there has to be a strong story. He also… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-02T14:33:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/greenwald http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/fair_use_question_about_non_profits_using_music/ QUESTION: Dear CSM, I am interested in streaming audio on my organization's website. More specifically, we want to stream a song on each of our issue pages. We want to find songs that reflect our positions on issues. What kind of music can we stream? We are a tax exempt 527 organization. Thanks, - "Green Change" ANSWER: The Supreme Court generally considers three things when deciding whether a use of someone else’s copyrighted material is fair or not. These include whether the use is transformative, i.e. whether the use changed the context of the original material or not, whether the use has an effect or could have an effect on the copyright holder’s ability to accrue a profit, and whether… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-01T15:10:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use_question_about_non_profits_using_music http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/fatworld/ Using video games to educate the public on diet, nutrition and making informed decisions. As American youth reach unprecedented levels of obesity, ITVS Interactive and PBS’s Emmy-award–winning weekly series Independent Lens are using a new kind of media to help find a solution to this complex problem. FATWORLD is an experimental, online video game that explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition and socioeconomics in the United States. Launched in January 2008, and downloaded 53,000 times in the two weeks after its release, the project demonstrates how public media can open a dialogue on deeply rooted social and economic problems, as well as the increasing opportunities to reach out to youth through online games and other digital media. FATWORLD takes players… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-01T14:52:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fatworld http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/wam_08_feminists_using_media_to_make_strides_for_change/ This weekend I had the great pleasure to attend the Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) Conference on the campus of MIT. While there, I met an impressive array of young activists and experienced professionals who use media (magazines, blogs, comics, radio, documentaries) to draw attention to their causes. The conference featured Keynote Speakers Helen Thomas, the first woman officer of the National Press Club and the first woman member and president of the White House Correspondents Association, and Haifa Zangana, a novelist and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime. The conference featured sessions focused on making high impact progressive media (presented by the Media Consortium's Tracy Van Slyke and Erin Polgreen); using technology to work towards social justice… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-01T14:23:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/wam_08_feminists_using_media_to_make_strides_for_change http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/this_weeks_maps_social_starfish_and_the_map_of_me/ This week's media map post is a twofer, since I was distracted last week by the stimulating Media Re:public conference, all about how the rise of participatory media is intersecting with the news and information environment. In honor of that theme I present the Social Media Starfish: Created in November by online marketer Darren Barefoot in response to a video by Web 2.0 guru Robert Scoble, the starfish is useful for public media makers thinking about different distribution, publicity and engagement platforms for involving publics with their content. It serves as a bit of a checklist in the round: create your film/tv show/radio broadcast/multiplatform extravaganza, post and tag related images, blog about it and contact related bloggers, announce publicity events… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-04-01T00:17:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/this_weeks_maps_social_starfish_and_the_map_of_me http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/digitalstory/ The Center for Social Media welcomed Stefani Sese, of the Center for Digital Storytelling, who led a discussion on the growing role that digital storytelling has in advocacy campaigns. She initiated the discussion by defining digital storytelling as “something between slideshow a PowerPoint presentation, and a documentary.” The Center for Digital Storytelling provides training to individuals to produce three-minute digital shorts that focus not so much on the technology or production technique, but on a good, powerful story driven by narrative and personal life experience, an approach that is rooted in theater and storytelling traditions. The projects are made possible by new, “DIY” digital media tools that make it easier than ever for advocates to tell their important stories and… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-31T19:25:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/digitalstory http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/turnitin/ There’s an irony in the recent court victory of the anti-plagiarism site Turnitin. I believe that Turnitin protects the jobs of the laziest group of teachers across the nation—people who assign the same general assignment year after year. Worse, Turnitin depends on a romantic and wrong idea of creativity (individual originality as the highest value), and it forms part of the copyright mis-education of American students by associating all copying and collaborating with cheating. But when it got sued, it turned to fair use—the right under copyright to use other copyrighted work under certain circumstances. (More on fair use here) The site, which collects student homework and adds it to a database that can be scanned for plagiarism, was challenged… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-26T17:41:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/turnitin http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/sxsw2008/ How are digital tools transforming the production of media? Anyone concerned with the future of public media needs ways and places to assess the rate and nature of change. South by Southwest (SXSW, aka South By), the combined tech-film-music festival in Austin in March, is one such place. Independent filmmakers and distributors flooded to panels discussing how the digital tools and social networking have changed both production and distribution. What last year was gee-whiz, look what we can do, this year was all about technique and strategy. Younger, no-budget filmmakers like Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA) discussed how to make feature films for less than two months’ rent. Victor Pineiro, the writer-producer of an eye-opening movie about gamers, Second Skin,… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-26T17:27:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/sxsw2008 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/lizmiller/ You’ve just seen a documentary film that told a powerful story, represented an important cause, raised awareness of an issue critical to people’s lives, or offered solutions to make the world better. Now what? The Center for Social Media welcomed environmental filmmaker Liz Miller for a discussion of her new documentary, The Water Front, and on how to strategically use documentary film to extend its story beyond the screen as a powerful advocacy vehicle for complex social issues. The Water Front tells the stories of the residents of Highland Park, MI, a post-industrial town in an economic crisis just outside of Detroit. The community is struggling against the unfair -and unaffordable- repercussions of water privatization (a move made by the… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-24T15:46:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/lizmiller http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/what_why_where/ I was planning a post about the media activism community for this weekly series on media maps that leads up to the Beyond Broadcast conference, but then I came across this useful visualization of content flow on Dennis Haarsager's blog, Technology 360. Haarsager, who was just named the interim CEO of NPR, writes: In a meeting with the NPR staff on Friday, I talked about there being three layers that we need to consider. At the top is why we're here at all as a non-profit. There are surely better formulations, but we make people smarter, better citizens, more culturally engaged. Let's call this the mission layer. The next layer is what we do. For NPR it's journalism —really good… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-23T20:31:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/what_why_where http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/cats_and_censorship/ Each week between now and our Beyond Broadcast conference, I'm examining an online media map, searching for the role that public media plays within it. This week's map is a project of Global Voices. Called Access Denied, it tracks online censorship and anti-censorship efforts of Web 2.0 content around the world. Like many of the new participatory maps, it uses Google maps as a platform. What does this map tell us about public media? Well, if you believe as we do here at CSM that publics are central to creating and sharing public media, this map demonstrates the crucial role that both ISPs and governments can play in fostering or frustrating public media projects. Of course, not all censored content… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-13T19:26:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/cats_and_censorship http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/katrina/ It’s been almost 3 years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans and parts of the Gulf coast. How has the region recovered? The Open Society Institute's Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster uses new media tools to document life in post-Katrina New Orleans and the surrounding region. Most importantly, the project demonstrates how new media can serve as a stepping stone to deeper analysis and discussion of issues like poverty, crisis management and the effectiveness of public policy in our country. Nearly three dozen journalists, photographers and youth media groups received fellowships from the Open Society Institute to collaborate on a series of interactive issue briefs that feature reports, photography and video projects examining the implications of life after the… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-13T15:16:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/katrina http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/crafting_public_radio/ Etsy—the innovative online marketplace for artists and crafters--is hosting a series of articles on podcasting as a form of DIY creativity, featuring interviews with and tips from independent and public radio producers, ruminations on the overlap between crafting and independent media making, and suggestions for the best podcasts from the Etsy community. Etsy itself has been a case study in how independent producers can succesfully band together to offer their products to a larger audience. In the process, crafters have organized around environmental and consumer issues, creating a recycling project for swapping supplies, and campaigns urging shoppers to buy handmade items as an antidote to consumerism run amok. The site offers buyers tools for shopping locally, as well as a… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-07T13:11:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/crafting_public_radio http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/bb_maps/ For the past year, I've been tracking the evolution of participatory maps as a new form of public media, a trend I outline in an In These Times story titled "The New Cartographers." Maps are everywhere these days. The ubiquity of global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile directional devices, interactive mapping tools and social networks is feeding a mapping boom. Amateur geographers are assigning coordinates to everything they can get their hands on—and many things they can’t. “Locative artists” are attaching virtual installations to specific locales, generating imaginary landscapes brought vividly to life in William Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country. Indeed, proponents of “augmented reality” suggest that soon our current reality will be one of many “layers” of information available… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-03T20:35:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/bb_maps http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/pm_read_all_about_it/ The first book chapter to emerge from the Future of Public Media research done at the Center is now in circulation. Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation, edited by Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) includes several essays on the challenges of developing public media in the digital, participatory era. For instance, Nick Couldry talks about how media and political representation are tightly joined. Mark Deuze discusses commercialization of the digital environment, and Josh Lauer cautions us to see current practices in data-mining as new ways to turn consumers into cash cows. Katja Wittke and Pat Aufderheide published the chapter “Mapping Publics and Issues in The War Tapes,” in which we show several… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-03-03T20:23:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/pm_read_all_about_it http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/fair_use_on_trial/ Chicago filmmaker Floyd Webb wanted to make a movie about a colorful martial arts figure, who called himself Counte Dante (http://johnkeehan.blogspot.com/). The grandmaster of the Black Dragon Fighting Society, William V. Aguiar III, tried to stop him by blocking his access to images of Counte Dante and material from his training video. But Webb had attended an Independent Feature Project panel discussion of the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. (IFP was a signatory and co-author of the document, which was facilitated by the Center and the Washington College of Law.) Webb knew he had fair use rights. Aguiar didn’t know that. Aguiar asked a judge for a preliminary injunction to stop Webb from using this material,… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-03-03T19:27:01-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use_on_trial http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/afj/ For almost 15 years, the Alliance for Justice has been using cutting-edge new media strategies to engage the public to advance the cause of social justice, civil rights and public empowerment – long before these tools became a part of our daily lives. Last week, the Center for Social Media welcomed Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, and filmmaker Glen Pearcy for a public lecture to discuss his newest film, Supreme Injustices and related digital outreach strategies. The film tells the stories behind two recent controversial Supreme Court cases addressing the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, and Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, which represents one woman’s fight for equality in the workplace. Supreme Injustices shows the hold… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-03-03T17:00:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/afj http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/nmi/ The NBPC’s New Media Institute, which held its second training workshop in November, is a vivid example of how public broadcasters can shape the future of public media. NBPC is training professionals in state-of-the-art digital and web tools, to tell powerful stories in new ways. This season’s workshop--held in Jackson, Mississippi, in partnership with Mississippi Public Broadcasting--focused on the culture of the Mississippi Delta region and the impact of American jazz. NBPC formed teams of filmmakers, new media professionals and web designers based on the participants’ interests and experience to work together to create games, podcasts (like ‘Sojuke,’, which integrates the poetry of Bryonn Bain and Mississippi jazz), mapping projects (Locative Media, which maps markers on the Mississippi Blues Trail)… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-02-29T19:39:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/nmi http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/eyetrack07/ The CSM was thrilled to welcome Pegie Stark this past Friday and Saturday to speak to American University students about her latest project, Eyetrack07, which explored the viewing habits of readers, and made some surprising discoveries about how people are absorbing information, both print and online. Dr. Stark's appearance was the second installment of the Center's Innovator's Forum Speaker Series. The objective of the project, as the Eyetrack website points out, "...was to focus on differences and similarities in print and online reading. How do print and online readers navigate through the paper or Web site? Do people behave differently when reading broadsheets and tabloids? ...And the big question on everyone’s mind: How much do people read?." Such findings will… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-02-25T17:12:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/eyetrack07 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/bigthink/ A new project called BigThink is making it easier for the public to find reliable, credible information on the Internet, as well as allowing individuals to make their expertise heard on important issues. The digital age offers the public an abundance of information, empowering individuals to make informed decisions on important issues, but the sheer volume of content makes it difficult to discern what’s reliable and what’s not. BigThink provides users with “direct, unfiltered interviews” with thought leaders and experts on a variety of ethical, political and cultural topics and offers the public a multi-media platform to respond to what these experts have to say. Discussion topics on the site range in theme, from the abstract ("What is Happiness?", or… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-02-20T21:09:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/bigthink http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/center_for_social_media_to_host_beyond_broadcast_2008/ June 17--save the date Building on the momentum of this year's very successful Making Your Media Matter gathering, we're thrilled to announce that the Center will be organizing the 2008 Beyond Broadcast conference. Over the past few years, Beyond Broadcast has become a can't-miss destination for innovative media-makers, scholars and policy experts seeking to understand the evolution of public media in a digital, participatory era. The theme of this year's gathering is "Remapping Public Media," and we'll be using mapping and visualization tools to examine shifting forms, functions and fiscal strategies for public media projects. We'll also be featuring demonstrations of how makers are using participatory tools like Google Earth to create dazzling interactive maps for public knowledge and action.… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-02-19T16:34:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/center_for_social_media_to_host_beyond_broadcast_2008 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/mediashift_presidential_participatory_media/ Mark Glaser at MediaShift wrote a very interesting blog yesterday that contains a variety of ideas for the next President of the United States to engage in an open and transparent discussion with the public via participatory media. Some of these exciting ideas include a Presidential blog, a public policy wiki that can play a part in creating a bill before it goes to Congress, live online chats, a money flow chart, and an up to date schedule of who the President is meeting with. These concepts are very exciting considering the growth of meaningful political dialogue online, but it leads me to ponder how censorship and monitoring would, against the ideals of this concept, almost inevitably come into play.… News from the Future of Public Media 2008-02-19T12:00:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/mediashift_presidential_participatory_media http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/ugc_uses_hollywood_archetypes_to_support_obama/ This election season has seen a surge of commentary from the User Generated Content community, and Obama supporters have taken to comparing him to Hollywood hero archetypes. Below are some great examples of pieces that rely on the principles of fair use for their commentary in the political sphere. Here is a video titled "The Empire Strikes Baracky." This video likens Obama to Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo, and positions Hillary Clinton as what is often considered to be the most evil character in film history, Darth Vader. The video attempts to draw a comparison in the story lines in the Empire Strikes Back to the evolving plot in the Democratic party. "The Empire Strikes Baracky" is largely comprised of… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-05-05T15:10:01-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/ugc_uses_hollywood_archetypes_to_support_obama http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/leo_eaton/ Our good friend Leo Eaton, a veteran public affairs and public broadcasting producer, writes in his annual letter to the field about how he sees the role of the documentarian. He also talks about the role of public broadcasting, and shares a revealing inside story that shows how embattled the notion of civil discourse on television is: I was series producer for the epic PBS current-affairs series America at a Crossroads that took over an entire week of prime-time programming (12 hours) back in April of last year. In spite of all the political controversy surrounding the gestation of a series whose task was to examine America’s role in the world 5 years after 9/11, the series was a great… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-29T19:47:01-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/leo_eaton http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/frame_grabs/ For the last 15 years, film scholars have been asserting their fair use rights to reproduce stills and frame grabs of films and videos they discuss in their work. They’ve been helped by a clear statement of their rights created by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Now, Kristin Thompson, who as president of SCMS in 1993 guided the creation of that statement, has assessed in her blog what has happened since. The news is all good: Scholars have used their rights, there have been no lawsuits, and related case law (especially the Bill Graham Archives case) has reinforced scholars’ claims. News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-29T13:22:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/frame_grabs http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/2008hotdocs/ At HotDocs on April 21, an international panel showcased the importance of exercising the balancing features of copyright, even in countries where fair use does not exist. Canadian filmmaker Brett Gaylor, who’s making a film called Basement Tapes: The Making of a Pirate Movie, explained how he’s encouraging others to contribute material to his “Open Source Cinema” project. Gaylor argues that copyright understanding constricts creativity. His film in progress exposes the enormous creativity unleashed in mashups, remixes, and sampling. It uses the balancing features of Canadian copyright law, called fair dealing, to display such work legally within the film, which is destined for legal release in Canada. Italian filmmaker Marco Visalberghi, vice-president of the Italian filmmakers’ organization Doc/It, spoke about… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-28T20:31:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/2008hotdocs http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/political_videos_utilizing_fair_use/ The usage of viral videos as a form of public media has grown rapidly in recent years, and political videos are no exception. During this evolution, political videos have begun quoting each other, very often utilizing fair use principles in order to provide commentary about other political commentators. Take for example “Hillary 2.0.” This video by Hugh Atkin adopts the format of videos by the group Anonymous (another fascinating internet emergence – read this post from Henry Jenkins’ blog to learn more about it). It suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is a machine that, prompted by the success of videos supporting Barack Obama, is studying popular viral videos as a way of infiltrating the consciousness of voters. This video suggests… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-14T13:11:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/political_videos_utilizing_fair_use http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/docaviv/ The highlight of my trip to the high-energy, high-touch DocAviv Documentary Film Festival was an open workshop on copyright and documentary, attended by about 35 filmmakers and a few lawyers. It shouldn’t have been surprising, but Israeli documentary filmmakers are just as frustrated and confused as U.S. makers used to be about what copyrighted material they must license and what they can just use. They’re just as eager to figure it out, and they’ve suddenly become poster children for fair use outside the U.S. Israeli law was just changed to incorporate U.S.-style fair use. “We don’t yet know how courts will interpret the law,” said leading entertainment attorney Tony Greenman. “But there is far more flexibility than there ever was… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-09T14:05:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/docaviv http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/avian_flu_watch_on_flickr/ A new watch pool on Flickr allows the public to follow the Avian Flu pandemic and to share information and news through images. The project is an example of the growing role that new web 2.0 tools hold in informing the public on important news from around the globe. Our research and focus on public media here at the Center for Social Media is important in understanding how society is evolving in its usage of media for public knowledge and action. You can read more about this in our Public Media FAQ. You can view the pool at http://flickr.com/groups/influenza/pool/ News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-04T17:15:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/avian_flu_watch_on_flickr http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/wam_08_feminists_using_media_to_make_strides_for_change/ This weekend I had the great pleasure to attend the Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) Conference on the campus of MIT. While there, I met an impressive array of young activists and experienced professionals who use media (magazines, blogs, comics, radio, documentaries) to draw attention to their causes. The conference featured Keynote Speakers Helen Thomas, the first woman officer of the National Press Club and the first woman member and president of the White House Correspondents Association, and Haifa Zangana, a novelist and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime. The conference featured sessions focused on making high impact progressive media (presented by the Media Consortium's Tracy Van Slyke and Erin Polgreen); using technology to work towards social justice… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-04-01T14:23:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/wam_08_feminists_using_media_to_make_strides_for_change http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/pm_read_all_about_it/ The first book chapter to emerge from the Future of Public Media research done at the Center is now in circulation. Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation, edited by Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) includes several essays on the challenges of developing public media in the digital, participatory era. For instance, Nick Couldry talks about how media and political representation are tightly joined. Mark Deuze discusses commercialization of the digital environment, and Josh Lauer cautions us to see current practices in data-mining as new ways to turn consumers into cash cows. Katja Wittke and Pat Aufderheide published the chapter “Mapping Publics and Issues in The War Tapes,” in which we show several… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-03-03T20:23:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/pm_read_all_about_it http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/fair_use_on_trial/ Chicago filmmaker Floyd Webb wanted to make a movie about a colorful martial arts figure, who called himself Counte Dante (http://johnkeehan.blogspot.com/). The grandmaster of the Black Dragon Fighting Society, William V. Aguiar III, tried to stop him by blocking his access to images of Counte Dante and material from his training video. But Webb had attended an Independent Feature Project panel discussion of the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. (IFP was a signatory and co-author of the document, which was facilitated by the Center and the Washington College of Law.) Webb knew he had fair use rights. Aguiar didn’t know that. Aguiar asked a judge for a preliminary injunction to stop Webb from using this material,… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-03-03T19:27:01-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use_on_trial http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/remixing_remixes/ While researching videos for Recut, Reframe, Recycle, I was often struck by the meta verse that exists in the user generated content world. Videos that remix are often being remixed, and the dialogue is ever expanding. The Dramatic Chipmunk meme, for example, is an interesting phenomenon. While conducting our research for Recut, we found that there were over 92 remixes of the "original video" (which was actually a remix of a Japanese television show.) Here is the original video: The meme is continuing. I recently came across the Dramatic Lemur: The recent viral success of Will.i.am's "Yes We Can" video has also spurred remixes, recreations, and the dimensions of the video are expanding to include parodies of other copyrighted materials.… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-02-18T19:30:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/remixing_remixes http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/public_catalog/ The “wisdom of crowds” logic has struck the Library of Congress, in a good way. The nation’s library (linked here) is now asking members of the public to identify and tag—on commercial site Flickr—thousands of public domain photographs in its collection. This attempt to use crowdsourcing to expand the value of resources that belong to the public at large is one worth watching. News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-01-31T15:22:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/public_catalog http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/sundance_2008/ This year’s Sundance Film Festival was chock-full of activist films, wearing their passion and conviction on their sleeves. There was I.O.U.S.A., Patrick Creadon’s travelogue of a small, conservative-tilting band of accountants (including the U.S. Comptroller General) on a nationwide tour to wake us up to the crisis of deficit spending. There was Flow: for Love of Water, Irena Salina’s alarming film about the poisoning of the world’s water supply and the counter-productive schemes of privatized water corporations to manage it. There was Fields of Fuel, Josh Tickell’s paean to biodiesel as a solution to our oil addiction. And there was Kicking It, Susan Koch’s chronicle of the Homeless World Cup, a soccer tournament that draws homeless from around the world,… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-01-31T14:07:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/sundance_2008 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/shiftspace/ The internet promises an open information environment, but with control of much online content held by individual website owners, the true “democratization” of information is stymied. A new tool called ShiftSpace is looking to change this by allowing users to add original meta-layers, or “Shifts,” on top of existing websites, helping to craft a fluid public space where users can contribute original content and commentary. By pressing the [shift] and [space] keys, users can see and create new content and commentary. ShiftSpace offers a variety of tools, including the basic ”Notes” and ”Highlights,” which allow users to comment on website content, as well as more ambitious features like the “ImageSwap” and “SourceShift” tools, which allow users to completely change web… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-01-23T16:48:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/shiftspace http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/fair_use_goes_international/ American creators who produce for the international marketplace—and that means most documentarians these days—complain that fair use doesn’t cross national borders gracefully. They’re right. But American-style fair use—the right to use some copyrighted material without permission or payment, when the public’s gain is greater than private loss (centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse)—is becoming more and more popular internationally. Israel has just passed legislation reforming its copyright law (read Hebrew? Here it is: http://www.knesset.gov.il/privatelaw/data/17/3/196_3_1.rtf. If not, the English is at http://www.tau.ac.il/law/members/birnhack/IsraeliCopyrightAct2007.pdf) . It has lifted entire the U.S. fair use language. It has then gone one important step further, avoiding the onerous and counter-productive legal sanctions on digital copying in the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Canada may be next. The Canadians are in the… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-01-17T14:36:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use_goes_international http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/ces1/ By Pat Aufderheide, Center Director The International Consumer Electronics Show, a huge and sprawling conference that takes up a major chunk of Las Vegas real estate every year, is primarily about the business of gadgets. But right underneath the froth about the latest Wii are big issues of culture and power. The subject of digital rights management (DRM)--techniques used by contentholders to control access to their content--is one of the hottest. Peter Jaszi of the Washington College of Law's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and I had the privilege of presenting our research, Recut, Reframe, Recycle at the opening panel session of this 150,000-attendee conference. With our latest research, we were able to remind people that beyond the… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-01-07T22:07:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/ces1 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/recut/ When college kids make mashups of Hollywood movies, are they violating the law? Not necessarily, according to the latest study on copyright and creativity from the Center and American University’s Washington College of Law. The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances. Fair use is… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2008-01-01T15:32:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/recut http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/sheffield/ By Pat Aufderheide, reporting on a panel she chaired at the Sheffield Film Festival on international issues in licensing for documentary films. Licensing can become private censorship, if filmmakers are kept from quoting critically important work to make their own. On the panel, producer Julie Goldman spoke about the astonishing rapidity of the adoption and success of the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in the U.S. filmmaker Michael McMahon described filmmakers' work to reform Canadian copyright law to expand "fair dealing." Italian filmmaker Gioia Avvantaggiato described a growing European movement to assert the "right of quotation." Lawyer Matthew Cummins, a representative of the influential British trade association PACT, noted that filmmakers need to have greater right to quote music… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-12-03T15:39:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/sheffield http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/right_wing_politicians_claim_fair_use_in_political_campaigns/ Right wing bloggers and MoveOn recently joined forces to protest Fox News Channel after the network sent cease and desist letters to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. These cease and desist letters came after Mr. McCain used footage from a Fox News clip in one of his campaign advertisements. The advertisement uses 19 seconds of a 90 minute debate Mr. McCain’s lawyers claim he is within the rights of Fair Use. Learn more about it here. News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-11-13T19:44:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/right_wing_politicians_claim_fair_use_in_political_campaigns http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/eff_guidelines/ The Center has endorsed a sensible and much-needed set of guidelines from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for managing the use of copyrighted material in online video. Online video has become territory for First Amendment brawls, as content companies have demanded "takedowns" of videos that use some copyrighted material--even when it might be perfectly legal to do so under fair use. The EFF guidelines bring back a little common sense into the process of assessing what is and isn’t fair to freedom of speech under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by establishing best practices that include: Tweaking service providers’ content filters to do a better job of distinguishing between fair use and infringement Improving the processes for disputing takedowns from… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-10-30T20:17:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/eff_guidelines http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/medialit_report_release/ By Ann Williams On Tuesday, September 25, the Center for Social Media, in partnership with the Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) and the Media Education Lab of Temple University, announced the release of its newest publication, The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy. The publication, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is the first step in an effort to develop standards for educators who continue to experience uncertainty, and often fear, when making decisions about what media is “safe” to use in their classrooms. Roughly 60 teachers, legal professionals and educational media makers attended the event at the Washington College of Law, while nearly 200 others participated via… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-09-27T16:48:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/medialit_report_release http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/fair_use_and_the_numbers/ By Pat AufderheideLarge content holders, such as the movie studios and music companies, have spent a lot of money over the years and supported the Copyright Alliance to issue reports showing that the American economy (and public culture) depends on tightly guarded copyright ownership rules. Now other economic interests are fighting fire with fire. The Computer & Communications Industry Association has sponsored a report showing that "fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright laws are responsible for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States" (http://www.ccianet.org/artmanager/uploads/1/FairUseStudy-Sep12.pdf). That number is substantially bigger than the Copyright Alliance's claims that $819 billion is contributed to the U.S. economy annually by copyright ownership. While you might quibble with the logic of either… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-09-18T14:21:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use_and_the_numbers http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/major_insurers_all_accept_fair_use/ Fair Use claims are now accepted by the four major U.S. insurance companies for errors-and-omissions insurance of fair use claims (AIG, MediaPro, ChubbPro, and OneBeacon). The companies' acceptance of these claims is perhaps the best gauge of the adoption of fair use in general, and the Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use in particular, since insurance companies are both the ultimate gatekeepers for television documentary and also historically cautious to adopt practices that involve risk. Major insurers are now newly interested in projects relying on fair use, with all requiring a legal letter of opinion about its principles. The Statement made such a letter of opinion far easier to write than ever before and has opened the doors for… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-08-01T20:34:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/major_insurers_all_accept_fair_use http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/new_copyright_and_fair_use_project_announced/ American University’s Center for Social Media and Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property are undertaking a multifaceted project. “Copyright and Fair Use in Participatory Media,” to promote standards for the use of copyrighted materials in user-generated media that is broadcast over the internet. This project builds on the two organizations’ success in helping to establish “best practices” for fair use by documentary filmmakers. Nonprofessional, online video now accounts for a sizeable portion of all broadband traffic, with much of the work weaving in copyrighted material. "We're pretty much a mixed-media generation," one student told American University researchers. A new culture is emerging--remix culture, an unpredictable mix of the witty, the vulgar, the politically and culturally critical, and the just… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-08-01T16:55:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/new_copyright_and_fair_use_project_announced http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/sad_kermit/ A recent article by Elizabeth Nolan in AFF’s Doublethink newsletter highlights the increasingly hazy distinction between what is and is not considered to be copyright infringement among user-generated content, and draws attention to the growing need for clearly-cut guidelines for the appropriate use of copyrighted materials. The fair use doctrine, which is outlined in the Copyright Act, presents provisions by which copyrighted material can be used freely, but these circumstances are very particular – the code does not cover a full spectrum of use, and the distinction between what is and isn’t fair use is confusing. The article recounts the story of Darrell Day and his friend Max Groah, two filmmakers from Ohio, and their “Sad Kermit” video, a homegrown… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-07-23T19:50:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/sad_kermit http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/success_of_the_statement_of_best_practices/ Since the Statement's release in November of 2005, several exciting and important changes have happened in the doc filmmaking world: gatekeepers are paying attention! Four of the seven national errors and omissions insurers now issue fair use coverage if a lawyer says that the use is within the terms of the Statement. ITVS endorses it, WGBH gives the Statement out to their producers, and PBS has shared it with all general counsels and general managers in its network. For a complete list of industry changes as a result of the Statement of Best Practices, go to http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/success_of_the_statement_of_best_practices . News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-06-06T18:57:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/success_of_the_statement_of_best_practices http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/two_fair_use_online_forums/ Over the last two weeks, the Center participated in two online forums on fair use. OneWorld co-hosted Ask the Experts! (http://us.oneworld.net/section/us/asktheexperts/fairuse) with us the week of May 11th; we received over 30 great questions from all kinds of media-makers about fair use and copyright issues. Over the next week, the Center is also participating in a D-Word forum on the same topic. D-Word is an online forum and community of documentary filmmakers which hosts panel discussions on issues surrounding their craft. You have to sign up to the forum to get access to it, but anyone can contribute to the discussion. Visit D-Word to sign up and participate in the forum before June 8th! Questions in the Ask the Experts… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-06-05T12:48:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/two_fair_use_online_forums http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/copyright_at_the_international_communications_association_meeting/ By Pat Aufderheide At the International Communications Association annual conference in San Francisco at the end of May -- thousands of communications scholars from all over the world! -- we got to raise a question that affects both media scholars and anyone making media about our world: what's fair in quoting from copyrighted material? This problem has hit media literacy scholars hard, since their core job is analyzing popular culture. And the problems of media literacy scholars are increasingly shared by anyone who wants to teach critical approaches to communication in any discipline. At an afternoon panel, Pat Aufderheide discussed why copyright law enables quotation as 'fair use,' followed by MIT's Henry Jenkins discussing how his own courses are not… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-06-04T15:02:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/copyright_at_the_international_communications_association_meeting http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/universities_in_the_digital_age_at_the_berkman_conference_issues_of_copyrig/ By Pat Aufderheide The Berkman biannual Internet & Society conference this year was a chance to brainstorm about the university in a digital age. While industry representatives wanted universities to put their emphasis on stopping peer-to-peer music and video activities by students (they nibble away at media companies' profit models), university librarians, administrators, scholars and teachers by and large thought the emphasis should be elsewhere. They wanted it to be on how academic freedom can best be expressed in a digital era. One sore spot: copyright confusion about the quoting of copyrighted material. Berkman scholar (and multiple award-winning book author) Lewis Hyde led a discussion of how these problems affect the work of university denizens. Some discoveries: --Distance-learning teachers and… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-06-04T14:34:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/universities_in_the_digital_age_at_the_berkman_conference_issues_of_copyrig http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/unauthorized_the_copyright_conundrum_in_participatory_video/ Suppose you’re running an online video platform, and people start uploading video that uses other people’s work. How should unauthorized use of other people’s work be treated in this new environment? Last month, the Center for Social Media and American University’s law school brought together executives from online video platforms in both commercial and noncommercial media with lawyers and scholars, to discuss how to manage unauthorized use. The group found alarming recent moves to create automated “bot” services to hunt down and eliminate copyrighted material; after all, many unauthorized uses are entirely legal and fair. Stamping out all uses of copyrighted material is also stamping out new creativity. The group endorsed more education of users around fair use and their… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-04-25T12:37:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/unauthorized_the_copyright_conundrum_in_participatory_video http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/remix_culture_the_movie/ Do you wonder what's really fair when you're making a mashup or a remix? So does everybody else. he rules are still being written for remix culture, and you could help write them. Take a look at the Center's new video, made by our own Dan Jones, at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/videos/remix_culture/. It's a great compilation of some of the Youtube "classics" from the last couple of years. Which of these uses of other people's work do you think is fair? We think the principles in the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use are an interesting place to start thinking. News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-04-25T11:27:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/remix_culture_the_movie http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/remix_culture_the_good_the_bad_and_the_confusing/ Worry, worry, worry. That's what happens, it seems, when college students upload video to online platforms. They care about copyright, and would like to own their own work and respect that of others. They just don't understand their own First Amendment rights or know how to comply with copyright law. That's what the Center's new study, The Good, the Bad, and the Confusing, shows. And in this case, confusion directly affects creativity, because people sometimes make creative decisions based on misinformation. Read it and let us know--does this strike a chord? News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-04-25T11:22:01-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/remix_culture_the_good_the_bad_and_the_confusing http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/another_insurer_for_fair_use/ Chubb has now joined the group of insurers that recognize fair use claims for documentary filmmakers. These insurers are depending on the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use to make their judgments (they want a lawyer to verify the filmmaker's decision that the use is within the Statement's principles). This is a big step forward, since for years before the Statement was issued, documentary filmmakers had not been able to get insurance for these fair uses. News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-04-25T11:19:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/another_insurer_for_fair_use http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/new_fair_use_research_on_media_literacy_join_the_group/ It was a thrill to participate in the workshop on media literacy and fair use at the Beyond Broadcast conference [beyondbroadcast.net] last weekend. Henry Jenkins (MIT), Bryan Baker (Temple U) and I brainstormed with about 25 creative media literacy teachers and makers--media arts center managers, profs, after-school programs leaders, filmmakers, bloggers and more. Bryan is part of a team led by Renee Hobbs [renee.hobbs@temple.edu] at Temple's Media Education Lab. They are exploring just what creative problems media literacy teachers and makers face, given what they understand of the law. This research will inform the next step--creating a best-practices document that helps everyone use the law more effectively. If you are interested in this issue, have a story, a question or… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-02-26T10:53:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/new_fair_use_research_on_media_literacy_join_the_group http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/mediapro_also_uses_fair_use_best_practices_statement_for_insurance_policies/ Now MediaPro has joined AIG as insurance companies using the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use as a guideline to accept fair use in its errors-and-omissions insurance policies for documentary filmmakers. MediaPro will depend on Stanford Law School's judgment that documentary filmmakers' uses are within the Statement's principles and conditions. This is great news for documentary filmmakers, and provides new opportunities for insurers as well. News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-02-24T08:27:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/mediapro_also_uses_fair_use_best_practices_statement_for_insurance_policies http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/insurer_accepts_fair_use_claims1/ A major errors and omissions insurer, National Union, a member company of AIG, is accepting fair use claims based on the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, when supported by an appropriate lawyer’s letter. This is an extraordinary demonstration of the power of this best-practices approach to making the fair-use option in copyright law useable again. “This is great news,” said filmmaker Alex Gibney, who recently got insurance with such claims recognized. In only a year, the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use has changed the clearance practices of documentary filmmakers. The Statement was created by five national filmmakers’ organizations (Association of Independent Film and Videomakers; Independent Feature Project; National Alliance for Media Arts… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-02-13T15:23:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/insurer_accepts_fair_use_claims1 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/yahoo_and_copyright_in_belgium/ A recent article details the struggles that Yahoo has faced regarding providing links to archived stories found in a group of Belgian newspapers. The newspapers claim that providing such an archive is an infringement of copyright laws. The article states that Yahoo " 'respects the copyright of content owners' and said it would 'respond in an appropriate manner' to the complaint." Yahoo, like Google, has cached links to articles that the newspapers would usually sell for access. This is an issue that the US newspaper industry has faced as well, and presents challenges to both consumers and the industry alike. What do you think? News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2007-02-06T16:46:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/yahoo_and_copyright_in_belgium http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/gossip_columnist_challenged_on_fair_use/ "Gossip gangstar" Perez Hilton is being sued by paparazzi photo agency X17 Inc. for his use of over 50 photos on his Hollywood gossip blog, according to the LA Times, "Perez Hilton takes their best shots." From the article, "If it turns out that what he does is copyright infringement — rather than a fair use of newsworthy images, as Hilton's attorney claims — it would not only put a serious crimp in the photo-driven field of gossip blogs, but possibly create new case law. 'The effect would be to eliminate the ability to comment on and transform photographs under the fair-use exception to the Copyright Act,' said Hilton's attorney, Bryan Freedman of Century City." News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2006-12-19T18:37:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/gossip_columnist_challenged_on_fair_use http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/fair_use_question_about_access_to_footage/ Want your questions on Fair Use Answered?? Check out the new Fair Use FAQ! Due to the overwhelming number of inquires about our work on fair use and the Statement of Best Practices, we have compiled a list of our most fr equently asked questions. In addition, we hope to share a new question with you every month via our fair use blog. This month's question is about fair use and access to footage. Q: Mark asks, "I'm under the impression--perhaps no longer accurate -that if I record footage, say an opponent's spot or news footage off the air, in my house I can use that tape/footage in my campaigns. But if I come by the footage from actual station… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2006-12-01T15:57:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use_question_about_access_to_footage http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/fair_use/online_content_gets_legal/ It's no secret that online video sites are plagued these days with material uploaded by users with no rights to do so, but not Revver! If you haven't checked it out yet, Revver allows you to upload videos and make money from advertising that follows the video as it travels around the internet. But, to be sure that users aren't making money off of someone else's stuff, Revver staff go through all the content that is uploaded. While it is great that Revver is trying out a business model that allows content creators to monetize their material, Revver has also adapted a forward-thinking attitude toward copyright. The policy is zero tolerance for infringement, but the staff have also created a… News from the Future of Public Media, Copyright & Fair Use 2006-10-31T18:47:00-05:00 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/online_content_gets_legal