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.