My colleague Peter Decherney has been studying and writing about fair use of digital media - specifically, for the purpose of teaching. The extension of copyright protections mindlessly, to the point where showing a clip of a film in class is a violation (and requests for exceptions are denied--although Decherney himself presented the case for extension of the exception recently and won it, at least for now). Narrow interpretations of fair use have shaped the way film and media are taught--which is thus to say, the way the next generation of scholars, film-makers and also customer-users of film, video, television are coming first to understand the subject. In order to feature Decherney's writing on this topic (from a special feature in Cinema Journal he edited), and perhaps just to be puckish, I've made PDFs of two short essays available here: 1, 2.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
unfair fair use
My colleague Peter Decherney has been studying and writing about fair use of digital media - specifically, for the purpose of teaching. The extension of copyright protections mindlessly, to the point where showing a clip of a film in class is a violation (and requests for exceptions are denied--although Decherney himself presented the case for extension of the exception recently and won it, at least for now). Narrow interpretations of fair use have shaped the way film and media are taught--which is thus to say, the way the next generation of scholars, film-makers and also customer-users of film, video, television are coming first to understand the subject. In order to feature Decherney's writing on this topic (from a special feature in Cinema Journal he edited), and perhaps just to be puckish, I've made PDFs of two short essays available here: 1, 2.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
