Archival Storytelling features roundtable discussions with people like Rick Prelinger, Claire Aguilar, Stanley Nelson and Sam Green and conversations with experts in the field like my personal hero, intellectual property law activist Lawrence Lessig. The inclusion of people from different disciplines – historians, archivists, lawyers and filmmakers – is very useful in conveying the complexity of the subject but there is also lots of good practical advice to help you get your films made. In fact, it may even make you think differently about how you tell your stories. After all, being able to draw on and build upon the creative output of others is a creative act in itself, and can lead to all sorts of delightful possibilities. Just think of the way music is creatively juxtaposed with images, or how archive can bring history to life or give us new perspectives on social issues. Not to mention contemporary mashups and other creative products of digital convergence culture.

Archival Storytelling focuses on American intellectual property law but it does also deal with legal issues in other countries, for instance fair dealing in the United Kingdom. The authors have kindly allowed us to include an excerpt from a conversation with Hubert Best, a partner at the law firm Best & Soames in London and an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property and media law. Best talks about British law and shows why fair dealing in the UK is so different to fair use in the US.

Download the extract here: archival-storytelling-conversation-with-hubert-best

If you can get to it, this looks like it will address a lot of the questions that we all have about mobile content and how it will pay…
Are you thinking of joining the next revolution in digital media and distributing your work through mobile phones or inventing software applications?

This seminar will give you an overview of the legal framework including licensing, royalties, data protection and more.

Wednesday 12 November 2008, 6.00-9.00pm (6.00-8.00pm presentations and Q&A followed by drinks/networking until 9.00pm.)

Location: Conference Room Suite, Accelerator, London Metropolitan University, Shoreditch Building, 35 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8AA.

To book your free place to attend, please visit: www.own-it.org/events

Topics covered include:
- All about contracts, from licensing to copyright assignments.
- How can you get paid? Various payment models explained.
- Moral rights.
- How can you protect your work from being copied or distributed beyond the terms and conditions of your agreement?
- How can you protect your work from being deemed ‘orphaned’ – meaning it’s distributed to so many users that nobody has any idea who the copyright holder is?
- What’s the value of your work? Is there a difference between music, games, characters, photography or writing?
- Data protection.

With regards to copyright, watch this TED video from last year in which Lawrence Lessig, a well-known expert on copyright issues, explains his vision for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition.

I attended a really interesting panel last week at Tribeca called Reuse Remix Renew – covering copyright and digital culture in advance of the release of the Tribeca Institute’s Sample This! licensing toolkit for filmmakers which should be available later this Summer. The panel included DJ Spooky – aka Paul D. Miller, That Subliminal Kid, who has recently released a book he has edited called Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. He said that his 1996 album Songs of a Dead Dreamer would probably not be released today because litigation against sampling has become so much more robust. Spooky thinks of this work as an “invisible sculpture made of fragments of history” and the battles over copyright come down to “who owns memory?” for him. He talked about how the old model of copyright is based on scarcity but now culture is “ubiquitous, downloadable, everywhere, all the time” and smart folk, like Google, are tapping into this new model and making millions. He went on to talk about the bootleg economy that is dominant in many countries in the world and to note that the way that the law is currently written and the way that we actually live are parting ways. We are moving toward a gift economy and people are having to work out how to monetize this in new ways. Digital literacy will be a big deal as we move forward in this new world.

Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons, is one of the people working to increase digital literacy and explore new ways of allowing legal reuse, remixing and sharing of creative work. “People are going to engage with things they love,” he said “so you have to create business models that accept this and work around it. People are not going to stop downloading but they respect the flexibility of Creative Commons.”

Jennifer Urban and Himanshu Singh from the USC Intellectual and Technology Law Clinic are working with the Tribeca Film Insitute to develop the Sample This! toolkit. Clinics like theirs help filmmakers with issues over fair use and the toolkit came out of this work.

Himanshu Singh, Eric Steur, Paul D. Miller, Jennifer Urban and moderator Georg Szalai from The Hollywood Reporter.

While I was thinking about fair use, sampling and copyright I re-discovered this awesome performance by Jamie Lidell so I’m embedding it here for some extra sample-tastic pleasure.

To celebrate this week’s single release (we still have those in England) Radiohead have broken up the song ‘Nude’ into pieces for you to remix.

For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, you can buy the separate components or ‘stems’ (bass, voice, guitar, strings/FX and drums) and remix your own version of the song. You can do this by adding your own beats and instrumentation or just remixing the original parts. More information here: http://www.radioheadremix.com/information/

You can buy the stems here: http://www.radioheadremix.com/buy/

You can upload your finished mixes here http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged and even voted on by ‘the public’.
You can also create a widget allowing votes from your own website, Facebook or MySpace page to be sent through too.

Hope you enjoy it

For those of you who aren’t that way inclined, Nude is also available in its entirety on CD and 7 inch (UK release) at the usual retail outlets.

Tamsin

SP London

Own-it provides:

• free legal contract templates, articles, podcasts and factsheets available for download
• free legal advice and a detailed FAQ section
• events to enable creative people to make the most of their ideas
• a directory of useful resources and contacts across creative sectors.

We will be posting more on this soon but in the meantime check out the film itself.

If you haven’t heard of Creative Commons go to the website right now because they are doing some really important work that filmmakers should be aware of. Creative Commons is pioneering new ways for you to license your work so that you can control the rights that are available – across the spectrum from all rights reserved to public domain. This is great for content creators who want to share their work without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.