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Copyright, Fair Use, and the Cultural Commons

Moderator: William C. Uricchio
Wendy Gordon Gordon Quinn Hal Abelson PhD '73 Pat Aufderheide: April 28, 2007; Running Time: 1:26:55

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Moderator William Uricchio sets the scene for panelists’ discussion of current copyright wars with a brief historical overview of copyright protection. In 1790, when news traveled by horse and carriage, copyright protection was good for 14 years. Today, when a digital, networked society enables instant transmission of data, protection lasts 70-plus years. Uricchio notes, “Bizarrely, the faster information circulates, the longer we’re extending copyright protection. It seems totally at odds with where our constitution framers and case law emerged from.”

Copyright came into being not just as a way of protecting authors’ rights, says Wendy Gordon, but as a set of liberties for the public as well. Yet exercising those liberties—especially in an age of corporate oversight of content—requires serious means. She says, “Our free speech guarantees are often not utilized to the fullest. It always seems easy to choose the second best word rather than get sued or arrested by saying exactly what you think.” The more licensing of material, the more companies insist on licensing, and judicial decisions follow. Gordon’s recommendation for the small player is “coalitions, courage and new customs.”

Gordon Quinn was part of a filmmakers’ group that decided to challenge corporations and assert their right to fair use. (Definition: legally quoting somebody else’s copyrighted music, pictures or words without paying or asking permission – if it benefits society more than it hurts the copyright holder). He has practiced self censorship out of fear of lawsuits, in one case dropping a scene of immigrants singing “Happy Birthday” in Spanish because it would have involved a significant clearance payment. To his films’ detriment, Quinn often eliminated or edited around questionable copyright content.

Pat Aufderheide (who speaks last in this panel) describes how her group, the Center for Social Media, helped organize filmmakers to challenge, by action and by persuasion, the standards established by music, motion picture and publishing industries around copyright. She discovered remarkable consensus among artists about what constituted reasonable use of preexisting, copyrighted material, including quoting for critique, quoting pop culture to make a point, capturing incidental material and using historical material to make points. With the resulting handbook, the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, filmmakers began to invoke their own guidelines. Today, after 18 months, says Aufderheide, major U.S. film insurers have begun to accept fair use claims.

Hal Abelson offers his sense of how copyright concerns constrict life at the academy. MIT, he says, has begun putting fences up around its own course materials, including the most basic and central of thinkers. For instance, it has limited online, published versions of Aristotle, Pascal and Fermat to students in a particular course, for a single semester. Huge expense goes into getting permissions from faculty, and university lawyers are so concerned about offending copyright holders that they bar reams of material from MIT’s OpenCourseWare site. Abelson believes these fences risk “destroying the university as an intellectual community,” and recommends using open content (granting Creative Commons licenses) as much as possible, as well as aggressively exercising fair use.

Lecture Details

Location: Bartos Theater

“Bizarrely, the faster information circulates, the longer we’re extending copyright protection. It seems totally at odds with where our constitution framers and case law emerged from. ”

William Uricchio

About the Speakers

Moderator: William C. Uricchio

Co-Director, Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT Professor of Comparative Media History, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

William Uricchio received his Ph.D. in cinema studies from New York University in 1982 and comes to MIT from the Institute for Media and Re/Presentation at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he was department chair. He currently directs a five-year cultural identity project in the European Science Foundation Changing Media Changing Europe initiative.

A Fulbright and Humboldt fellow, Uricchio has published widely on early television, early cinema and their emergence as cultural forms, including Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films(1993); Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens: Kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945 (1993); The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (1991); and "The Nickel Madness": The Struggle to Control New York City’s Nickelodeons in 1907–1913. His most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, New Collectivities and Europe (forthcoming).

Wendy Gordon

Professor of Law and Paul J. Liacos Scholar in Law, Boston University

Wendy Gordon has argued for an expansion of fair use utilizing economic, Lockean, and ethical perspectives.

Gordon Quinn

President and Founding Member, Kartemquin Films

For over 40 years, Gordon Quinn has been making cinema verite films that investigate and critique society by documenting the unfolding lives of real people (i.e., Hoop Dreams, 1994). Quinn is working on Milking The Rhino, a film examining community based conservation in Africa and At The Death House Door., a film on a wrongful execution in Texas.

Hal Abelson PhD '73

Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT School of Engineering

Harold (Hal) Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor Of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. He holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from MIT. In 1992, Abelson was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows, in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions to teaching and undergraduate education. Abelson was recipient in 1992 of the Bose Award (MIT's School of Engineering teaching award). Abelson is also the winner of the 1995 Taylor L. Booth Education Award given by IEEE Computer Society, cited for his continued contributions to the pedagogy and teaching of introductory computer science.

He was also a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, and he serves as consultant to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He is co-director of the MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology.

Pat Aufderheide

Professor, School of Communications, American University
Director, Center for Social Media

Pat Aufderheide is the author of several books including Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (2007), The Daily Planet (2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (1999). She has been a Fulbright and John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival. She received a career achievement award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association.