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March 16, 2006
Fighting Copyright Ignorance with Comic Books
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The new comic book Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law?, produced by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. |
The Center for the Study of the Public Domain, in an effort to educate content producers about the realities of copyright, have published an amazing comic book called Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law? The comic book, available in various digital formats as well as on paper, is an entertaining, highly informative about the often-confusing world of copyright law.
The book follows the story of a documentary maker putting together a film about life in New York City. ("Trapped by a STRUGGLE she didn't understand.... By day a FILM MAKER... By night she fought for FAIR USE!") As she's gone around and captured scenes for her film, she's also picked up incidental uses of other people's work - a saxophonist playing a song, a sign in the background with a company logo, public TV screens showing images of Bart Simpson. These scenes are a reality of modern life, yet they're a nightmare for documentary producers. As the comic book notes, one producer was forced to remove footage that featured someone whose mobile phone ringtone happened to be the theme to the movie Rocky because they couldn't afford to pay the song's publisher $10,000 for including it. In other cases, important works like the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize get locked away for years because the producers couldn't afford to pay for the clearance rights of incidental music. (Thankfully, Eyes on the Prize will finally air again on PBS this fall, after years of fundraising to pay for clearance fees.)
The question is, who's in the right? When does the incorporation of someone else's creative work into a new work constitute fair use, and when does it cross the line?
Page after page, the comic goes through examples of producers who've found themselves in difficult circumstances because they allowed themselves to get pushed around by big-media lawyers - even when their use of someone else's content is justifiably fair use. It's intended to give producers confidence when it comes to using someone's content in a fair use context, explaining when the law is on their side and when it isn't.
The comic book also practices what it preaches by being publish under an attribution-noncommercial-sharealike license from Creative Commons, which is also explained during the course of the story. This particular copyright license means that anyone can redistribute or re-work the comic book as long as it's for noncommercial purposes, they cite the producers of the book, and that they pass along the same basic copyright rules to their own license. My blog uses this same license, so that allows me to share some pages from the book without having to ask permission or worry about interpretations of fair use:
The Center for the Study of the Public Domain is doing a tremendous public service by publishing this comic book and making it available for free over the Internet. Perhaps Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals, whom they quote in the book, said it best: "Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain.... Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture." -andy
Posted by acarvin at March 16, 2006 3:53 PM
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