Carrie McLaren has a great piece the difficulty of clearing rights for Mad Hot Ballroom. An excerpt: “When Agrelo and Sewell were filming boys playing foosball after school, Ronnie (right) at one point shouted, “Everybody dance now!”, a line from a C+C Music Factory hit. Incredibly, the filmmakers’ lawyer said the line had to be [...]
In the discussion with the director, Alex Gibney, following a showing at the San Francisco Film Festival of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, it came out that CNBC claims to have erased all of its coverage of Enron. It would be good to verify whether this is the case, but if true, it [...]
A new report by two American University professors finds that restrictive interpretations of copyright law are distorting the films they do make and changing the kinds of films documentary filmmakers choose to make.
Larry Lessig offers another argument for open televion archives latest column, Copyrighting the President, detailing the recent refusal of NBC to sell footage of President Bush to a documentary film maker, because it (in NBC’s words) “is not very flattering to the President.” Lessig asks “what happens when the commander in chief uses private venues [...]