Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?

What liabilities do you open yourself up to if you catch someone's mother answering her cellphone on video?

In a piece titled, Fair Use Follies, Brooke Gladstone interviews two experts on the fair use issue. What can be freely reproduced? What snippets of song or text need to be paid for? In the case of the documentarian mentioned above, three words can cost upwards of $5000! What tragedy is unfolding in what Lawrence Lessig has renamed the Comedy of the Commons?

From On the Media, May 19, 2006:

Simply put, “fair use” is a legal principle that allows copyrighted material to be used without permission from or payment to the owner. But a recent symposium on the subject at New York University demonstrated just how difficult it is to know what constitutes fair. And in the meantime, many creative types are left in the lurch. Amy Sewell, producer of the documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom", shares some war stories with Brooke.
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One of the panel is Duke Law professor, Jamie Boyle, one of the leading experts in the creation and usage of ideas and art in the public domain.

To help people like us who go cross-eyed when confronted with legal prose, he has put out a graphic novel on the topic: Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture. This book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

The production and distribution of this book was made possible by support from the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations. It is a project of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which focuses on the delicate balance between intellectual property and the public domain - the realm of material that is free to use without permission or payment.  To read about some of the Center's projects in areas ranging from neglected diseases to music sampling, click here.

Support the Center (This link goes to Duke University's general donations form, on which the Center is pre-designated as the recipient)

• James Boyle interviewed on NPR
• Plain old html - Read the book!
• Flash animation with page flipping and a magnifier tool. Requires flash player ( download flash player ) and high-speed connection, loading make take a few minutes
• PDF- the entire comic in one downloadable file
  (8MB) (16MB)
• Download a high res image of the cover for your website or printed work (color optimized for printing) (jpg, 1mb) (jpg, 3mb)