Since we just
recently were on the topic of right vs. left I thought I’d educate myself a bit
on copyright law. My interest in the topic came up during the recent Digital Hollywood seminars here in New
York on a panel about the art of the deal.
Lawyers on the panel used a lot of verbiage that I had certainly heard
of, but lets face it, had little educated knowledge about. Did you know what a “sunset provision” was?
No, not a deal involving Sunset Boulevard, nor Before nor After Sunset.
Here a quick overview
of some of the concpets that came up during this and other pannels: Copyright,
Sunset Provision, Creative Commons Licenses, Copyleft, Public Domain, Fair Use,
and FRAPA and what they mean to me as a content producer and filmmaker. Texts
in italics are copied if not noted otherwise from Wikipedia or other sources
(noted).
To bring it to a
point: this is really a discussion to be
had about the space between all our first Amendent rights (as US citizens) and our
rights as content creators. With the event of the internet in general and social
media in particular the landscape has shifted into a new dimension. Legal concepts and structures like Fair Use,
Creative Commons Licenses and FRAPA give us protection, rights and options to
negotiate that space between our right of freedom of speech and our right to
protect our work as content producers.
