HN206 - Creating Documentary - Onuora: Copyright

This indispensable guide distills the authors’ years of experience advising documentary filmmakers, English teachers, performing arts scholars, and other creative professionals into no-nonsense advice and practical examples for content producers. Reclaiming Fair Use begins by surveying the landscape of contemporary copyright law—and the dampening effect it can have on creativity—before laying out how the fair-use principle can be employed to avoid copyright violation.

As hip-hop rose from the streets of New York to become a multibillion-dollar industry, artists such as Public Enemy and De La Soul began reusing portions of previously recorded music for their songs. But when record company lawyers got involved, everything changed. Years before people started downloading and remixing music, hip-hop sampling sparked a debate about copyright, creativity, and technological change that still rages today.

Copyright law was once an esoteric backwater, the special province of professional authors, publishers, and media companies. This is no longer the case. In the age of social media and cloud storage, we have become a copying and sharing culture. Much of our everyday communication, work, and entertainment now directly involves copyright law. Copyright law and policy are ferociously contested. Record labels, movie studios, book publishers, newspapers, and many authors rage that those who share music, video, text, and images over the Internet are "stealing" their property. By contrast, copyright industry critics celebrate digital technology's potential to make the universe of movies, music, books, and art accessible anytime and anywhere - and to empower individuals the world over to express themselves by sharing and remixing those works. These critics argue that excessive copyright enforcement threatens that promise and stifles creativity. In [this book], Neil Weinstock Netanel explains the concepts needed to understand the heated debates about copyright law and policy. He identifies the combatants, unpacks their arguments, and illuminates what is at stake in the debates over copyright's present and future.