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Fair Use and Free Speech
Category 2: Sampling popular culture
to portray societal conditions
 In
Refrigerator Mothers, about an era when mothers were blamed
for their children’s autism, J.J. Hanley and David Simpson
quoted popular films of the era.
They claimed fair use because the film clips,
by demonstrating social attitudes of the time, reflected popular
culture of the era.
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 In
Kartemquin Films’ Women’s Voices: The Gender Gap,
made to encourage women to vote, stereotyping of women in media
was critiqued through animation techniques.
Kartemquin claimed fair use of the TV news clip because
the film was commenting critically on the specific piece of media
quoted.
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 In
the Frontline documentary "The Persuaders," directors
Barak Goodman and Rachel Dretzin filmed an advertising team presenting
a demo of a commercial featuring the tune “Downtown,”
by Petula Clark.
They invoked fair use for the song because
they had not chosen it as a soundtrack element; rather the song
was integral to the scene that they were capturing for other purposes.
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 In
the Frontline documentary "Merchants of Cool,"
director Barak Goodman quoted a teen horror movie, I Still Know
what You Did Last Summer, in a report on the marketing of popular
culture to teens.
He invoked fair use because this horror film
is used as a point of reference for a discussion on the effect of
media, sex and violence on teens.
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 In
Game Over, a documentary about the social effects of video
games, Nina Huntemann quoted several video games to make the point
that they have become even more realistic.
The Media Education Foundation employed fair use, because these
quotes provide a context for the filmmaker’s critical analysis
of this kind of media.
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 The
Nova documentary “Cracking the Code of Life,”
about the search for the human genome sequence, quoted the film
Gattaca.
The clip was included under fair use because
the film illustrated popular attitudes toward the application of
this scientific knowledge.
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 In
Money for Nothing, Kembrew McLeod argued that popular music
stars were being chosen for their ability to cross-promote their
work.
McLeod claimed fair use for advertisements,
album covers and television programming because he was making a
critique of the media products themselves, as examples of a cultural
trend.
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 When
Jed Riffe examined an archeological controversy in Who Owns
the Past?, he quoted magazines and a 60 Minutes program
in reference to the historical moment of discovery of ancient remains.
He employed fair use because these quotes illustrated
the reaction of the
press at that historical moment.
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