Bloggasm

This is nothing I really stopped to consider before. I knew that film-makers who make fictional films have to run the copyright loops from a variety of venues, considering that they’re dealing with things like ad-placement, movie-albums, etc…, but never did I realize that documentarians have to go through these same hurdles. There’s something about this that just makes you want to scream; the fact that those who have enlisted themselves to record history for us in visual form aren’t completely protected by fair-use laws. There’s a Wired article that interviews law professors who wrote a comic book about this subject: Battling the Copyright Monster.

At one point, it begins talking about how copyright has changed over the last 80 years, and how it has actually become an us-versus-them mentality for film-makers:

A fourth thing that cuts the other way is the fear-and-loathing syndrome. There’s a whole generation of filmmakers and digital creators whose only experience of copyright is as a hassle, as an obstruction, as a cease-and-desist letter preventing them from making or distributing their work. They see copyright as a pointless labyrinth they have to make their way through to make their art. We actually view ourselves as copyright defenders, showing how copyright is supposed to work. We’re saying this imbalance could cause us to lose the next generation of artists, if they think of copyright as worthless.

But perhaps the most shocking paragraph in the whole interview was this one:

First of all, documentaries are incredibly important records of our history and culture. They’re visual histories, and they’re increasingly based on copyrighted culture. Our book describes several instances in which the telling of that history has been thwarted by permissions issues. An example is Jon Else having to pay $10,000 for a four-and-a-half-second clip of The Simpsons playing in the background of his film (Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle). The makers of Mad Hot Ballroom had to pay that same amount to EMI because a cell phone rings in the background of one of the scenes, and the ringtone is the theme from Rocky. These examples really resonate with people. They understand that these are instances where copyright is not working the way it’s supposed to.

A massive amount of money for a Rocky ringtone that went off somewhere in the background? For a documentary? Something that usually isn’t expected to make much money anyway?

via IFC

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