Public Media 2.0 Field Report: New Muslim Cool: Engaging Stakeholders in the Filmmaking Process

• Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Statement of Fair Use for Media Studies Publishing
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies Statement on Fair Use for Teaching Film and Media Educators
• Impact Outside of the Box: Assessing How Digital Video Can Engage and Influence Publics
• More...

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Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare[PDF]

This document is a code of best practices designed to help those preparing OpenCourseWare (OCW) to interpret and apply fair use under United States copyright law.

Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics[PDF]

Public broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, and network newscasts have all played a central role in our democracy, informing citizens and guiding public conversation. But the top-down dissemination technologies that supported them are being supplanted by an open, many-to-many networked media environment. What platforms, standards, and practices will replace or transform legacy public media?

This white paper lays out an expanded vision for “public media 2.0” that places engaged publics at its core, showcasing innovative experiments from its “first two minutes,” and revealing related trends, stakeholders, and policies. Public media 2.0 may look and function differently, but it will share the same goals as the projects that preceded it: educating, informing, and mobilizing its users.

Multiplatform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature of truly democratic public life from here on in. And it’ll be media both for and by the public. The grassroots mobilization around the 2008 electoral campaign is just one signal of how digital tools for making and sharing media open up new opportunities for civic engagement.

But public media 2.0 won’t happen by accident, or for free. The same bottom-line logic that runs media today will run tomorrow’s media as well. If we’re going to have media for vibrant democratic culture, we have to plan for it, try it out, show people that it matters, and build new constituencies to invest in it.

The first and crucial step is to embrace the participatory—the feature that has also been most disruptive of current media models. We also need standards and metrics to define truly meaningful participation in media for public life. And we need policies, initiatives, and sustainable financial models that can turn today’s assets and experiments into tomorrow’s tried-and-true public media.

Public media stakeholders, especially such trusted institutions as public broadcasting, need to take leadership in creating a true public investment in public media 2.0.

Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use[PDF]

Documentary filmmakers have created, through their professional associations, a clear, easy to understand statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use. Download this useful handbook, written by veteran filmmakers to help other filmmakers understand some instances where using copyrighted material without clearance is considered fair use. Click here for the full report & here for a list of authors and endorsers of the Statement.

Digital Futures: A Need-to-Know Policy Guide for Independent Filmmakers[PDF]

Digital technology is transforming filmmaking. And policymakers are scrambling to catch up with the changes. What policies are good for independent filmmakers? What are the hot issues, and what are the positions that best support the creativity and diversity that independent filmmakers represent? Digital Futures: A Need-to-Know Policy Guide for Independent Filmmakers answers those questions with to-the-point answers.

Ephemeral for no good reason: the waste of documentary and independent films[PDF]

By Rick Prelinger

The wide availability of inexpensive and user-friendlier production tools has finally brought us closer to the long-deferred dream of mass moving image authorship. But while many (though not all) obstacles to production have crumbled, distribution problems are escalating.

Intellectual Property Issues for the Social-Issue Documentary Filmmaker[PDF]

By Shari Kizirian

Cultural arts journalist Shari Kizirian provides an overview of intellectual rights issues—copyright, trademark, digital rights management—as they affect the creative work of filmmakers.

Keepers of the Public Domain in Electronic Media: Keep It Up!

Keynote address by Pat Aufderheide

Keynote address at the annual convention of Alliance for Community Media, the member organization of cable access stations nationwide on July 10, 1999, Cincinnati, Ohio.