Claire Darby's Posts

Question:

Dear Center for Social Media:

I’m a video production professor, and my students do a great little assignment where they re-edit a scene from a movie. Sometimes they’re very funny. We’d like to show them in the university-wide film festival, and send the students home at the end of the year with a DVD compilation of them. I’m even thinking they’d make a nice promotional item for our program. Read more...

I've made a video where I claim fair use on a film clip that features a celebrity. I'm confident that it's fair use--I've transformed it from its original context, and been careful to take just the amount I needed. I hope to release this work commercially. But can the celebrity then say "I acknowledge the clip was protected by fair use, but using my likeness to make money from this film isn't fair use"? In other words, does a celebrity's right to benefit from his or her likeness trump a filmmaker's fair use rights? Read more...

Couldn't make it to our Making Your Media Matter Conference on May 12, 2010? Or perhaps you were there, but would love to re-visit some of the great ideas that came from our panelists and presenters? You're in luck! Read more...

QUESTION:

Dear Center for Social Media,

I have a question that touches on point four of the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video. I own and play a game called Audiosurf. The game uses songs as a base and creates game levels based on the properties of the song such as BPM, pitch etc. Each level is the length of the song chosen and the player plays it in a Guitar Hero like game play, with varying game modes changing how it's actually played.Read more...

What keeps filmmakers from having a sure sense of what’s acceptable, in an environment where every day the demands for entertainment, sensationalism, and extremism are ratcheted up?Read more...