John Holbo has an interesting discussion on the relevance of copyright law to humanities scholarship. Why, he asks, are cultural and literary studies scholars not up in arms over the latest moves to extend intellectual property further back in time and toward the interests of culture industry stakeholders over the general public?
Doesn’t the prospect of great swathes of public domain threatened by information age Inclosure Acts seem bothersome, not to mention plutocratically sinister, hence (dare I say it?) activism inspiring? Don’t people who want to do research and publish find their work is hampered, or at least worry it might be? I can’t think how many interesting publishing projects would have been potentially opened up immediately, or in the near future, if Eldred had gone the other way. Music, film, TV, radio, also plain old literature - orphaned works, anyone? Sure, the sanctum sanctorum of education - the classroom - enjoys very strong fair use protections. But what about the great book, website, CD or DVD you could have made? Aren’t there lots of humanists in this position, pining to create a wonderful multimedia project but bound by the surly bonds of copyright for the indefinite future?
The short answer to his question is that yes some media/culture/lit scholars are concerned, but for the most part there’s a certain defeatist political resignation. Copyright law, like broadcast regulation or deeding to Dept of Interior-managed property, currently falls under "political spoils"; our guys lost and the public really doesn’t have the interest to rally behind our cries against the Mickey Mouse Copyright Law or studios litigating fair use or what have you.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t issues worth pressing for a broader hearing. Chuck Tryon has been following the battles of documentary filmmakers to use copyrighted material as fair use; currently the landmark series Eyes on the Prize has been out of distribution because of legal disputes over the archival footage. As for the film studies scholarship itself, the picture is more mixed. The discipline is oddly enough very slow to embrace new-fangled technology, including the sort of multimedia projects John cites. Part of that may be the sheer difficulty imposed by copyright: even getting studio permission for a few piddly stills for publication can be a headache and a major expense, so I can’t imagine a larger project dealing with any commercially-titled cinema. It’s probably no accident that some of the more interesting multimedia works to emerge have been in the field of early cinema, where copyright is abated somewhat.
But I work mostly on postwar (and to a lesser extent 30s) Hollywood, which tempers my activist streak: I benefit from having studios restore and rerelease films from the period. It’s not always a make or break situation: these studio films are often in archives like UCLA’s, but I don’t have the resources for frequent archive trips, so I too benefit greatly from video availability, and the more that Fox or MGM/Turner release, the less reliant I am on the kinds of canonical repertory showings of film archives or the last wave of video releases. Perhaps less tangibly, too, having a general public aware of historic texts aids the climate in which people find historical film scholarship relevant and useful. However, studios will usually only finance film restoration, video transfer (at quality that we film scholars expect) and distribution if they think there’s a market and if they have exclusive rights for the near-to-mid-range future. On the other hand, too stringent a clamping down on fair use squelches scholarly use: film stills, DVD-ROM clips for classroom discussion, duping of out-of-print and rare works.
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