Read Bound by the Law - Comic book on intellectual rights

[csziggy]

Bound By Law http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/



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 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/) license.

The production and distribution of this book were made possible by support from the Rockefeller, MacArthur and Ford Foundations. It is a project of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain (http://www.law.duke.edu/), which focuses on the delicate balance between intellectual property and the public domain - the realm of material that is free to use without permission or payment.

And here is where you can get a free downloaded copy of it: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/

Now how often to the law professors at Duke write a comic book?

Note: I am only part way through reading this - and have learned a lot. I did not realize that the reason some of the great documentaries, such as Eyes on the Prize, had bee taken off the market was because of the restrictive intellectual rights laws. One of the points in the comic is that this is another way of controlling our history. If a documentarian cannot include popular culture, how does that change what they can say about our past?

[katty]

1. thanks