Film and Fair Use

Today the Center for Social Media at American University released "A Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use," which details the situations in which today's documentary filmmakers believe they have the right to quote copyrighted material without licensing it.  What are those situations? According to the report, they are: employing copyrighted material as the object of social, political, or cultural critique; quoting copyrighted works of popular culture to illustrate an argument or point; capturing copyrighted media content in the process of filming something else; and using copyrighted material in a historical sequence.

A FAQ that accompanies the report explains that the statement is, in part, meant to help filmmakers help themselves:

The study also shows that many filmmakers are unnecessarily cautious in making "fair use" of preexisting copyrighted materials...  But filmmakers tend to avoid it either because they don't know what's allowed, or because they believe - often on the basis of experience, sometimes on the basis of others' experience or hearsay - that "gatekeepers" (funders, broadcasters, distributors, insurers, and others) wouldn't accept the claim.

The full report is available here.  Last year the center produced "Untold Stories," a study conducted with some fifty documentary filmmakers over the course of a year about their difficulties.