Battleangel

Hollywood Reporter - Five organizations involved in documentary films will next Friday release a manifesto of sorts titled “A Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use,” which will set out guidelines under which filmmakers can make use of copyrighted material without being subject to often exorbitant licensing fees.

Filmmakers, when they want to include a clip from a news broadcast or another film, are often asked to license not just the clip itself but also various underlying rights — say, for example, the music rights to a tune that happens to be playing in the background when a film crew is shooting in a real-life study.

In their initial study, Aufderheide and Jaszi found that for many filmmakers, licensing rights has become not just an expensive proposition but also an inhibiting one. Citing dozens of examples, they contend, for instance, that the budget of Jonathan Caouette’s homemade 2004 documentary “Tarnation” ballooned from $218 to $400,000, “using most of the eventual budget to clear rights.”

Since rights are often licensed for fixed periods, further problems pop up when they must be renewed. Henry Hampton’s “Eyes on the Prize,” a study of the civil rights movement, is now out of circulation because it originally purchased five-year licenses and renewing them was prohibitive.

But the snag of course is that in the case of documentaries, often designed to criticise, there are people who would rather not see them take flight. That is one of the corner stones to the frenzy of modern intellectual property legislation. A clever way for the powers to be and their cronies to silent dissent, curb free speech and all in days work, on top of this claiming they stand up for copyright-holders, private property or the American dream. They’ll come up with anything.