Patricia Aufderheide's Posts

"It is a treat seeing the product of legislation we wrote in the 80s," said Rep. Henry Waxman at an Independent Television Service award ceremony for him. "The rich and powerful often get their way in D.C., but the poor and marginalized don't get their story told."

Waxman, who is widely beloved for his pragmatic and conscientious struggle to leverage government for the good of many, whether in health care, the environment or the media, was remembering the 1988 legislation he shepherded, which created ITVS. Read more...

Edward Snowden made a surprise appearance at the "News Organizations & Digital Security" convening. His message: Use encryption and be as safe as you can be, but don’t settle for playing defense. Demand policy that doesn’t turn journalism into a guerrilla activity, and that increases government accountability. Read more...

At the "News Organizations and Digital Security" convening, journalists and technologists faced sometimes grisly realities about the challenges individuals and news organizations face to safely secure communication.

The event, co-hosted by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, also showcased current tools (and their limitations) for encryption. Read more...

Can a library put a professor’s reading list of book chapters and other excerpts from academic monographs on e-reserve for students in the class, without permission from the copyright holder?

That’s been in dispute since 2008, when publishers sued Georgia State University for doing just that. A District Court judge ruled that almost all of the scores of uses were fair, but also set an arbitrary standard of 10% for allowable quoting from academic monographs.

And the publishers appealed. Now an appeals court has reviewed the ruling, and sent it back for corrections. Read more...

At the 2014 Getting Real Documentary Film Conference, hosted by the International Documentary Association, the Center is releasing new research on the embrace of fair use in the field.

Based on a survey of 489 documentary filmmakers by Patricia Aufderheide and Aram Sinnreich, the survey finds that a great majority of documentary filmmakers understand fair use, find it valuable in their work, and have had no trouble with acceptance by broadcasters, lawyers or insurers. Read more...