Fair Use

At the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA), journalists and documentarians from around the globe shared stories of risk and reward in telling truth to power.Read more...

At the Houston Cinema Arts Film Festival, fair use was celebrated as a powerful tool for the arts. Indeed, museum practice is already changing, as a result of the creation of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts.  Read more...

When Judge Pierre Leval gave the 4^th Peter Jaszi Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Property at the Washington College of Law, he made it clear: fair use is grounded in copyright’s core value of enrichment of public knowledge.  Read more...

In the November 3 session of American University's School of Communication Faculty Forum Dr. Aram Sinnreich discussed the idea of Configurable Culture in his presentation “Ethics Evolved: An International Perspective on Copying in the Networked Age”. Configurable Culture, a term coined by Dr. Sinnreich, is a set of cultural forms and practices that allow people to manipulate cultural information in a new way.

Examples include mashups, memes, and machinima. Each time people enjoy memes featuring Lipton Tea and Kermit the Frog or listen to The Grey Album, they are consuming configurable culture. Read more...

At 100Reporters’ “Double Exposure” symposium in Washington, D.C., whistleblower Edward Snowden (via proxy servers), who released information on NSA spying, got to meet some of the team that broke into FBI headquarters in 1971 and released information on the infamous COINTELPRO operation. It was hard to tell who was more impressed with whom. Read more...