Foxing Fox With Fair Use

When guerilla documentary filmmaking meets the Internet and political activism, sparks are sure to fly, and Robert Greenwald is certainly causing alot of those sparks with his new documentary about Fox News' republican bias, "Out Foxed". Fox News (the people famous for suing Al Franken for trademark infringement for his book title) is now hinting they might sue the filmmaker (or are they?), bringing an added focus to the issue of "fair use" in modern copyright law. Some of the expected copyfight pundits are weighing in, but this is something that filmmakers (especially documentarians) should be paying close attention to -- issues like the broadcast flag treaty and the INDUCE act from Senator Hatch are eroding the important "fair use" provisions that make media activism and social critique as vibrant as it is.



Broadcast Flag Treaty Draft

Ernest Miller of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (one of my favorite bloggers and thinkers on the straining edge of IP law online) brought to my attention yesterday to the troubling draft of the WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcast Organizations ("cuz heaven knows they're all face with extinction," he comments) that will get debated in June of this year. It is, in essence, a copyright-style land-grab for broadcasters and would give broadcasters rights of fixation, reproduction and distribution of a program for 50 years after its broadcast seperate from the copyrights of the material broadcast itself. The United States even wants it to apply to "webcasters". The push for this has been underway since August 2002 but it deserves more scrutiny from the broader community who might be impacted.