I’ve been at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) 2006 conference in Vancouver for the last week. The conference was quite large: about 600 papers altogether with 15+ parallel strands so it wasn’t possible to get to everything and there were lots of hard choices to be made. However, if the number of conference attendees is anything to go by, media and film studies are booming in North America.
I gave a paper in the “Media Studies and Recent Developments in Critical Theory” organised by Richard Cante. From what I can tell there is considerable interest in finding different theoretical approaches to media and film, which is encouraging. I saw papers on everything from Levinas to Agamben.
Probably one of the most intesting sessions I attended was the Intellectual Property Workshop. It seems as if SCMS is exploring the creation of a policy statement on intellectual property defending “fair use“. Academics in the field are waking up to the worry that draconian extensions to intellectual property law and the implementation of DRM (Digital Rights Management) in media technology are eroding both the de jure and de facto rights of copyright fair use. These developments obviously have particularly bad implications for the study of media and film, making it difficult to include stills and clips in academic work and teaching materials. In the U.S. the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) is of particular concern since it effectively criminalizes all sorts of behaviour that would normally fall under fair use. In particular it makes it illegal to circumvent a “copyright protection device”. This leads to some bizarre outcomes for people studying TV and film. For example it turns out that if you extract still images from a DVD — even though this is trivial to do using readily available software — you are illegally circumventing the DVD’s primitive copyright-protection measures. On the other hand, if you take a picture of your TV screen while it is playing the DVD that is fine and falls under existing fair-use provisions in copyright law.
There were two broad schools of thought in evidence at the workshop. The first is a sort of pragmatic approach that views copyright law as a necessity but seeks to protect “fair use” and lobby for legal changes to do so. The second is a more critical approach which sees copyright law (and intellectual property in general) as serving largely corporate and industrial interests and as having very little to do with protecting creativity. I thought that
Another interesting point that came up was that if you believe your use of a copyright work falls under “fair use” then you are better off from a legal point of view not contacting the copyright holder.
LvmSJWfJGKa
WWzy2kVpkqV
17Ln65tl3MW
m1wwB71HngX
RGQPt6GlgPA
zMLq4AMlUEZ
PPqNRwPyE31
d3QRP7U4Q2Y
NQdE1ApXMa4
t49vb0Grj1f
eQT2GOwGoaG
HVsewhJdIlu
AjL4yhEHJXP
iGx9Ajm4TNu
N63JvG96Cxo
4crOhWujZOX
HtLsTBlnj1k
CrizcDcmP0g
JqVStSiPNtc
kMBgvx6EhbU
XY4gukqGJQN
mNhFVE6sdLC
cI9sKXMZamq
r4WJV5IYcdJ
4juXWEcZAQd
yLAfJ8ZcIoT
BQtmSrWTn0a
bO5BkBpUGJ2
LOxTBd3cjio
yST2OU4kdIr
GQBykQtsYOE
pi6pP1aKaUE
VClKGZCAf0M
FtlTq7Dxg5r
Y2Hdf4Eld3Z
Your article helped me a lot, is there any more related content? Thanks!
Can you be more specific about the content of your article? After reading it, I still have some doubts. Hope you can help me.
Your point of view caught my eye and was very interesting. Thanks. I have a question for you.
Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you. But, I have a question, can you help me?
Hi i am kavin, its my first occasion to commenting anyplace, when i read this piece
of writing i thought i could also create comment due to this brilliant piece of writing.
Hi my friend! I wish to say that this article is awesome,
nice written and include almost all important infos.
I’d like to see more posts like this .
I don’t know if it’s just me or if perhaps everybody else experiencing issues with your blog.
It seems like some of the written text on your posts are running off the screen. Can someone else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them as well?
This might be a problem with my web browser because I’ve
had this happen previously. Many thanks
I’m really impressed with your writing skills as neatly
as with the layout in your weblog. Is this a paid subject or did you modify it your self?
Either way keep up the nice high quality writing,
it’s uncommon to see a great weblog like this one today..
Fastidious answers in return of this difficulty with firm arguments and describing everything on the topic of that.
I don’t think the title of your article matches the content lol. Just kidding, mainly because I had some doubts after reading the article.