an online comics on the rights situation for documentary film-makers. .

from the center for social media:

Documentary filmmakers have created, through their professional associations, a clear, easy to understand statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use. Fair Use is the right, in some circumstances, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying for it. It is a crucial feature of copyright law. In fact, it is what keeps copyright from being censorship. You can invoke fair use when the value to the public of what you are saying outweighs the cost to the private owner of the copyright.

Download this useful handbook, written by veteran filmmakers to help other filmmakers understand some instances where using copyrighted material without clearance is considered fair use.

Statement Authors

• Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers
• Independent Feature Project
• International Documentary Association
• National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture
• Women in Film & Video (Washington, D.C., chapter)

Statement Endorsers

• Arts Engine
• Bay Area Video Coalition
• CINE
• Doculink
• Electronic Arts Intermix
• Full Frame Festival
• Independent Television Service
• Kartemquin Films
• National Video Resources
• P.O.V./American Documentary
• University Film and Video Association
• Video Association of Dallas
• Women Make Movies

On the 8th of April the FC UK constitution passed unanimously at the FC UK general assembly at the Limehouse in London. As Deptford.TV is publishing the content under the Creative Commons License and the Art Libre License the discussion around the rights issue on digital media is a main focus of the research into new forms of film-making.

the creative commons license should
also be looked at critically. creative commons looks at culture as
rough material whereas the artlibre license, see http://artlibre.org
or the general public license see http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft where a
new version is just writen are looking at culture as work of art - i
prefer the phrasing of the artlibre people. but, on the other side cc
is much more a "standart" worth going for...

if talking cc, it should be made clear about which license your
talking, because clearly not all of them are as open as they assume to
be (with taking a parallel approach to the free software movement) -
my prefered licence is by-sa as it is similar to the general  public
license or  artlibre license.

regarding the discussion about non-commercial - i think it is not a
good idea to say that documentaries are non commercial. in my eyes
they shurely are - what makes it interesting for doc filmmaker to use
by-sa, which allows commercial use, is that a pool of material is
generated out of which doc filmmakers can bennefit - and at the same
time taking away the power of the big media players over their
archives - similar to the free/open software movement sharing their
source code, benefiting the community and givin microsoft a hard time...

please see also some thoughts in the next two hidden posts on why not
nc from the free culture network see http://freeculture.org.uk

also look at: http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html

an email exchange regarding the non-commercial issue with
rufus pollock from the open knowledge foundation:

First, a by-sa license is clearly 'freer' than a by-sa-nc in that it
places fewer restrictions on the use of the work. In general this is a
good thing since it means fewer occassions on which people have to
/ask permission/. In fact I would go as far as to argue that a nc
license is not really an open license (as defined in the open
knowledge definition: http://www.okfn.org/okd/)

Second is all commercial usage bad? I have a friend who made a very
alternative documentary about Chavez and distributes it for free. At
the same time he has received payments when it has aired by commercial
tv stations (they often pay even when they don't need to). This would
make his work 'commercial' but it seems a far cry from, say, use in a
coca-cola advert. Do you really want to prevent that kind of usage? If
you do you've just cut out most of the main avenues for 'serious'
reuse of your work -- ultimately most documentary makers would like to
see their stuff get out to a wide an audience as possible and that
means broadcast on a commercial network.

Third for the types commercial usage that I imagine you would most
object to (e.g. adverts) the makers would probably not want to have
'sa' their work. Therefore they would need to come and relicense from
you and at that point you are in the same position as with an nc license.

Thus overall I think there are significant gains in terms of greater
freedom for reuse, the benefits of being truly 'open' and its
consequent benefits for making the content commons, while the downsideis minimal.

answer from saul albert from the living archives
project on the open knowledge foundation mailinglist:

Robert Altman calls the GPL a union - I don't think it's a union. I
think it's a guild. High value labourers can form guilds within which
they share their labour and knowledge and guard it from uninitiates
and potential exploiters. They can do this because the high value of
their labour and knowledge is capable of generating a surplus that is
of most use to the guild as a community if it's shared.

Unions came into their own as organised groups of low-value labourers
whose only real leverage with bosses was/is the refusal of their
low-value labour.  There's no surplus to go round, no 'regulation' of
labour, just the start-stop button of a strike. Information proles
don't own anything - and we are all information proles. Even the
CC-using musicians are information proles when they go to the
supermarket and get their clubcard scanned, or their information is
shuttled around and cross-referenced by various semi-privatised
government services. But we're not organised in a union of information
proles with this understanding of the relationship between the
information we create and the information we excrete - all of which
has value. Were we're sold the idea that we can have a 'piece of the
action', but I think it's misdirection.

With CC-BA-NC-SA or whatever other combination of CC licenses, I think
they do little more than gentrify the debate over the iniquities of
global copyright law, and have nothing *whatsoever* to do with 'commons'.

about 'freedom' in CC/NC discussions that I think are best dealt with
by leaving the detail out and focusing on material movement of value
through systems of ownership. That is a class issue, and it's really
not very difficult to explain or understand.

In the interest of moving the discussion somewhere more useful, I
think the best argument for dropping NC in most contexts is the
packaging issue. Debian works *really really well* because it deals
with packaging exquisitely - formally and legally. If you're running
debian or a derivative, try 'sudo apt-get install anarchism' for a
great practical demonstration of knowledge packaging.

Anyway, I don't need to start on that old chestnut. It's pretty
clearly argued here:
http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html