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

At 6 o'clock in the morning, 17th of march, the draft of the database structure was finished – after a night session between london & zurich we can upload our files. So far we will upload the rough material and tag the clips with metadata.

1. Step was to digitize the tapes. And here we had a surprise with some of the tapes. If the date and time wasn't set on the camera we couldn't digitize with automatic start/stop detection, as date & time was the metadata written on the tape which allowed to distinguish between scenes. This is important as we save the clips as smallest possible units into the database, which is between when the camera operator pressed "start record" until the operator pressed "end record". Those tapes without date & time stamp had to be separated into clips manually.

The clips then get a specific filename: number-of-tape_part-of-tape_DTV-number-of-clip.mov (or .avi) example: 001_2_DTV- 3.mov

– number-of-tape: we numbered the tapes of each participant. This tapes will be archived at dek.spc.org – The idea behind this is that we can access the highest quality possible, if there is a wish for a higher resolution edit. . In our example it's the first tape.

– part-of-tape Often there are time-code breaks. Or the camera operator continued filming on a different project. It is important to log this, as after a time code break the time code starts counting from 0 again. In order to digitize from the right position the tape has to be manually forwarded or rewinded into the part of the tape (in our example if we would be at the beginning of the tape we would have to manually forward into the second part of the tape after the first time-code break).

– DTV stands for Deptford.TV

– number-of-clip.mov (or .avi) stands for the number of the clip, .mov is a quicktime container and .avi is used by premiere

2. Now the clips needed to be transcoded into the h.264 or in our case the open x.264 codec. On linux you can use ffmpeg for transcoding, on a Windows system videora or super and on a mac OS X system isquint. Though there is an issue with the openess of this codec as there is a patent pending. For further information see http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com. 

3. The clips are uploaded and tagged with meta-data. The tagging of meta-data allows the collaborators to read about the clips of others and to see if any of the clips might be interesting for other projects.

Following tags are attached to the clips:

– filename (see point 1)

– artist

– title of the project
– place / post code (which would allow a mapping of the rough material)
– original source
– description
– transcript (if it is a longer interview or longer clip)
– rating (still needs to be coded)

The rough material is released under the creative commons open content license with which collaborators can share there footage. The first results can be looked at http://watch.deptford.tv

The user-management is based on the wordpress software in which we use the blogging function to blog our videos – in the moment the database is a vlog and vodcast – soon also an ogg stream…

This workshop was the production workshop. The themes which had been brainstormed over the tv hacking workshop where narrowed down. We had five groups of around 4 people shooting to the topics "boat community", "deptford sinphony", "music history deptford", "boundless.coop", "then & now", "crossfield estate" plus others who dropped in and out and shot independently on their individual topics & issues.

Further information on "the boat community" project. 

Further information on "deptford synphony" project. 

Music history Deptford is an idea of bringing together the information of the music scene of deptford and offering musicians to collaborate with film-makers – to do music documentaries but also to explore deptford's music history.

Boundless – this project documents the wireless network boundless. BOUNDLESS is the broadband co-op established during 2004 to support community development of fast local internet access, inter-linking residential, business, educational, cultural and digital media communities. . The first mesh nodes of the network have been installed in Deptford, South East London, where community interest has seeded action and driven progress. It draws on a wealth of local experience and enthusiasm to share resources, presenting the work, lives and times of its users.

Then & Now – about the old power station of Deptford – a collage with pictures of the area around stowage & where the power station used to be.

The project "Crossfield Estate" is looking at the architecture of the Crossfield Estate in Deptford and it's development.

The Deptford.TV workshops started on the 3rd of march 2006 with TV hacking, presented by the bitnik media collective. Bitnik presented their projects and their focus on hacking media & mapping media. picture by James Stevens

video of the tv hacking presentation
video of the q&a of the presentation

the telestreet film

Carmen started showing their mapping project where bitnik programmed a software for mapping political situations in countries and to display them on a world map. In this project they try to show how the environment influences the information show and how people communicate – the mapping project was shown at the world summit on information society in Geneva – it was done with the suport of “science et cité” – to debate the information poor & the information rich in our world.

In 2004 bitnik started to work with TV and the question of how to open up this one to many communication system to a many to many system. One starting point was with the question “how can a community make their own tv station?” and the other starting point was “how can the internet be used to achieve that?”.

Bitnik wanted to approach this experiment with the copy & paste attitude of the net generation. In TV hacking bitnik understands the internet as a tool to collect content. Bitnik started off by installing a pirate TV station by building a small broadcasting system with a range of 2km in Zurich, Switzerland

TV hacking referes to the tactical media project telestreet in Italy. Italy has a long history with tactical media because they have a very restricted television system which is control by one person: Berlusconi. They have a long history for pirate tv.

In the beginning they made pirate TV station which served the whole city – but soon they had to do a different approach, because they where easy to track. So they started to distribute over mini senders which where mashed up.

One of the first experiment was the distribution of football. Because sky had bought up all the rights for football in Italy fans could only watch it with a pay license – so telestreet started to distribute the games in two different ways: one in showing normal films on tv but as soon there was a goal they interrupted with people clapping and showed the score (of course if you liked the film more you missed something 🙂 and the other approach was that one guy bought a pay satellite dish and they re-broadcasted this signal to the neigbourhood.

Another project is van gogh television, trying to make television interactive they used, telephone, fax and modem – and played the game tik,tak,toe – they used also the news ticker which now days is used by almost an television station. In this new ticker they showed the television number and people could call up and participate. they distributed over satelite.

The third project influenced the work of bitinik was paper tigger television. A new york based collective which produces videos distributed to community television station arround the states. During the 91 gulf war they distributed a different view on the war. the first idea was let’s collect material from people and make a broadcast for several hours. But bitnik quickly realised that there where not enough people providing content. Bitnik decided therefor to search for content – do allow the community to search for content over the internet

Bitnik created the copyfight system a simple enginge see – copyfight allows you to upload clips to the server but also to search for clips over filesharing systems and to program them into the system which distributes over an antenna. In Switzerland it is not as big as a problem as the aerial distribution is mostly not used anymore – most of the tv distribution goes over cable – in comparison to the uk where freeview is coming.

Bitnik started experimenting with the system and started using it for parties as well during wich we used a bunch of tv’s in a whole house and distributed to all the rooms.

Stopp gap tv is a project which uses the concept of gap fillers on television. With the copyfight system bitnik didn’t had the producers to make a program – but bitnik also didn’t wanted to do a television program – bitnik where more interested in the research on tv and internet – they found out that in Switzerland the experimental TV is only during late night – as per example in the UK there are the game shows – so they realised that the night gap is the interaction time – bitnik was surprised on the big amount of people using this late night programs – bitnik build a roboter with a camera on the top of it transmitting data to the television station – which is driven by solar energy – on top we had the solar lights giving the power – the robot was recieving sms text send by mobil phone and the user could direct the robot and see the movement on the copyfight television.

The copyfight system uses also sources from the internet which can be downloaded to the server – you can make your own playlist – the idea is a self editorial system – a system which is open, the user connects to the web site and programs the system. Per example you can use the prellinger archive – per example “night of the living death” the zombie movie is in public domain – you can take it legal and distribute it. Copyfight is not a do it yourself system it is a compose it yourself system – three steps: 1. you find the clips per example over file sharing system – 2. you add metadata and add it to the database – 3. and last you distribute it over the copyfight system.

Bitinik thinks that the source of program produced by public television should be open, as the public paid for it – the BBC is running a project called creative archive – also have a look at free culture…

On the second day the 4th of march 2006 the workshop participants split up into groups and brainstormed what topics they could document, film, produce for the next workshop, the regeneration documentation.

please also see our brainstorming session…

Luke Hearn’s comment (workshop participant), quoted from archive.org wayback machine::

RE: generation collaboration

• Node.London

Running as part of the Node London’s ‘Deptford TV’ event cluster “Documentary Database” on Saturday was the third and final in a series of workshops, exploring audio-visual documentation of the regeneration process in Deptford.

Located at SPC media lab (previously Deckspace HQ), at Borough Hall, Greenwich, this has been host to the do-it-yourself media for over a decade, long before the Internet existed, as we know it today.

Run by Adnan Hadzi, an artist/curator and PhD student, the workshop is dedicated to the idea of bringing a community of individuals together who are interested in taking part in the democratisation of the media making process whereby we can all subvert the user/producer paradigm.

Consisting of mainly local film-makers, activists and students interested in documenting the so-called “regeneration” process, the idea behind the “Documentary Database” workshop specifically was to transfer this extensive (uncut) video documentation to a database on a server (provided by the Boundless.coop network) so that it is freely available (at watch.deptford.tv) under a Creative Commons “share-alike” license (permitting others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work).

As always not only is the project focused on user-based collaboration, but it is also enabled by collaborating with other artists and art groups. For instance the web-based software is custom built by collaborators bitnik. And of course the master of all things wireless, James Stevens is involved.

It will be interesting to see what kind of output this online material has. By the sound of things Adnan is very open to the possibilities, and not very specific about how this might work. Maybe because he’s not really sure yet himself, or perhaps because it is the process of sharing and collaboration that are more important to this project than the outcome.

The Deckspace space is a phenomenon which anyone having even the remotest interest in digital arts scene should be aware of. Check the Node.L calendar to see when the next Deptford TV event cluster event takes place.

“Wer hat dem wird gegeben, wer nicht hat der nimmt’s sichs eben” (Brecht) As a member of the D-word community 1 I was involved in last years’ discussions about the ‘Democracy project’ 2, virtually on D-word, and physically at the IDFA Democracy pitching forum. I believe that Western Democracy is facing its biggest crisis around the issue of property and specifically intellectual property. The poorest of our planet survive through sharing, smuggling, squatting, stealing and hospitality. Their survival depends on gift-economies and cannot be sustained through the laws of the ownership society. New technologies offer a potential for new ways of production and distribution of knowledge and culture through archiving 3, file-sharing4 and time-shifting systems5. Nevertheless, existing corporate interests are using their political powers to protect an old business model that is under pressure from these new technologies, and that is propped up by electronic patents 6 and digital rights management. The Western economic model is unsustainable; there cannot be endless growth, endless profit, endless expansion. In order to sustain itself the ownership society needs to expand into new areas and is now colonising our common intellectual and cultural heritage. However this raises serious ethical issues: why would a poor HIV/AIDS patient have to pay for patents in order to receive medication? This colonisation of knowledge is threatening the very idea of Democracy. How can a democratic debate take place if knowledge is restricted to a small group of engineers and corporate interests? True democracy is based on free, informed debate, and supported by cultural exchange, diversity and education. In order for a democratic system to function knowledge has to be free. Therefore we have to move from the ownership society to a gift economy 7, from copyright to hospitality. Godard once said “Let’s not make a film about politics, let’s make a film politically”. Isn’t it time to look for new ways of production and distribution and, when it comes to the Democracy Project wouldn’t it be a brave act and at the same time a significant statement to allow for open online distribution of all material produced under its name? To copyleft 8 all films and media content and make it freely available for everybody to view, remix and redistribute? Adnan Hadzi

with the deptford.tv project we establish a database of roughmaterial and edited clips which carry embeded metadata. the fact that we use an open content license makes it possible that the material can be shared between the participants.

such a database offers searches on existing footage into themes, dates, authors, description etc.

and regeneration shouldn’t really mean gentrification – deptford greek just lies on the border between greenwhich and lewisham – urban, industrial setting – now there are plans of changing the face of deptford and to bring this two boroughs together. many issues arise about which we would like to tell & discuss at deptford.tv – in a way locative media…

the main area of interest is the research of new methods of filmmaking and
where they can be applied, looking at (and refering to) the old utopia of
the video movement (60ties / 70ties) and further back brechts many-to-many
thesis of radio distribution and the vertoff theories on film: reaching
access to culture and knowledge through media for as many people as
possible.

in the case of deptford.tv this is done with the use of digital networks
under open licences. the thesis is that the use of floss and open content
will enable these "utopian" forms of communication to a certain degree (as
in collective approaches to media production).

.