Permissions on Digital Media Drive Scholars to Lawbooks:
"When some 20,000 first-year American medical students reported to their schools last summer, they received a free 20-minute multimedia collage of music, text and short video clips from television doctor dramas, past and present, burned onto a CD-ROM.
'The patients you meet in the coming years may have doubts about you because of the doctors they see on prime-time television,' the introduction reads. 'The aim of this presentation is to explore why that is, and suggest what you can do about it.'"
But the CD was perhaps more of an education for its developer, Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.
"It's crazy," Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions, waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of video clips included on the CD, which was paid for by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The process took months, Professor Turow said, and cost about $17,000 in fees and royalties paid to the various studios and guilds for the use of clips. The film used ranged from, for example, a 1961 episode of "Ben Casey" to a more-recent scene from "ER."
This Friday, Professor Turow and other experts will meet at a conference sponsored by the Annenberg School to debate how digital media fits into the concept of "fair use" - a murky safe harbor in copyright law that allows scholars and researchers limited use of protected materials for educational or commentary purposes.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/business/media/14fair.html
No comments:
Post a Comment