A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture. This book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
I'm all for intellectual property. People that create should be compensated. But what the hell? I mean CHARGING FOR A RINGTONE IN A DOCUMENTARY? Are you kidding me?
This is essential stuff. Everywhere we look, more and more things are being removed from the 'I can do that' list of life. Read this (comic) book. It's substantially more dense then Spider Man, but it's a much better read.
Download this comic book here:
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/pdf/cspdcomicscreen.pdf
Listen to an interview with the author (James Boyle) here: http://www.ibiblio.org/wunc_archives/sot/index.php?p=684
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