[Infowarrior] - Is copyright killing documentaries?

[Richard Forno]

Doc makers say unique voices being silenced by rights battles
Last Updated: Sunday, April 27, 2008 | 2:36 PM ET Comments8Recommend30
CBC News

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2008/04/27/creative-commons.html

Documentary filmmakers say it's getting tougher to make independent
productions because of growing restrictions on what images and sounds they
can use.

The battle over rights issues was a hot topic of discussion at Toronto's Hot
Docs Film Festival, where a session last week about fair use was packed with
filmmakers from around the world.

Many filmmakers fear they'll soon no longer be able to fully document our
pop culture and mixed media age because of the high cost of using footage
and sound, and the consolidation of rights to this material in a few hands.

Toronto filmmaker Stuart Samuels has been working on a documentary called
27, which mixes archival footage of the lives of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix
and Jim Morrison.

It hasn't been easy, he told CBC News.

"What's changing now is everyone is much more understanding that copyright
or the products they own mean money," he said.

"The prices right now are all relevant. Half of my budget is rights
clearances, if you can get them."

Image archives and sound libraries are getting snapped up by larger
companies and consolidated in a few hands.

It's both more difficult and more expensive to get rights, Samuels said. Yet
without the keen eye of documentarians to parse pop culture, the age of
media could become a monoculture, he said.

"Because of the consolidation, what you're having are intellectual ghettos
in a sense," he said. "So the Murdoch group has this stuff, and these
studios are going here. So what they do is make in-house documentaries that
have the pretense of objectivity but are basically restricted by 'what you
own is what you see.'"

Even more difficult in EU

Italian filmmaker Marco Visalberghi says overlapping laws and sky-high costs
have made documentary creation difficult in the European Union.

Anything covered with copyright "belongs to the big libraries that cost a
fortune," he said.

"Freedom of speech is basically impossible in this world that is made up of
pictures."

As a result, directors are abandoning anything with a hint of pop culture
content, Visalberghi told fellow filmmakers in Toronto.

Filmmaker Brett Gaylor ran into the clearance quicksand working on a film
about copyright.

"We tried to get a clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger dropping a puck on a NHL
game, because Schwarzenegger came up to Canada to lobby the government about
outlawing camcorders in movie theatres," he said.

"But CBC wouldn't release it unless the NHL agreed. And the NHL wouldn't
release it unless Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed."

Schwarzenegger didn't agree and the clip was never used.

Creative Commons one way to share

Gaynor is backing a Creative Commons for documentary makers ‹ a source of
footage and sounds that is not controlled by a major corporation.

His website opensourcecinema.org promotes sharing among filmmakers.

Many Canadian documentary makers are getting on board the Creative Commons
movement, which involves filmmakers making their work available to others
and setting the terms for reuse of their own work.

Samuels says its necessary for filmmakers to have the freedom to put
archival images and material together in new ways.

"If we don't dissect and deconstruct our pop culture about how it is and how
it influences us and changes us, then basically we're one big channel. We're
one global village, but we're all singing the same note."
With files from Eli Glasner