Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Category

One of the outcomes for the Scholarship in Sound and Image workshop we hosted in June is a forthcoming book, The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, that Christian Keathley and I are writing/editing. I’ve written a chapter focused on copyright and fair use issues, which I have posted below for open commentary and […]


Recently there has been a debate raging within the film world around The Artist‘s appropriation of Bernard Hermann’s score to Vertigo (which itself appropriates Wagner), and Kim Novak’s poorly-worded attack on this act of cultural borrowing. The best response is to borrow more, as exemplified by Kevin Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz’s video remix contest at […]


It’s been a summer of minimal blogging, what with various family plans, media consumption, and household tasks. I do have a number of posts in the planning stage, and a longer essay drafted that will appear here soon. But yesterday a bit of news arrived that mandated a return to blogging. The Library of Congress […]


The following post is only tangentially about television, being about the state of academic publishing as seen through the lens of one essay of mine (which happens to be about the television show Veronica Mars). So if you read this blog primarily for television thoughts and are not interested in the politics of academic publishing […]


As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m on the SCMS Public Policy Committee and one of our main initiatives is to draft formal policy statements on how cinema & media scholars deal with copyright and fair use. Two years ago we released a best practices document outlining guidelines for teaching and pedagogy. Now I’m happy to announce […]


My textbook, Television and American Culture, has hit the streets (or at least the postal system – order yours now!). I received my first copy yesterday, and am happy to say that it looks great. This is due not to my own work (I’m solely to blame for the content), but the excellent staff at […]


I’ve read a number of articles like this one, speculating on the potential future of the Blu-ray disc as media platform in the wake of online delivery of HD content. As a consumer and viewer, I’m heartened by this, as I’ve not jumped on the Blu-ray train yet. Moreover, I see a lot of potential […]


Today the Center for Social Media officially released its latest in its series of excellent fair use guides, The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education. It’s must reading for anyone involved in media pedagogy or policy. However, in what has become a trend, I must protest the way the Chronicle […]


Not that they need any advertising, but I wanted to highlight this entry on David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s blog about the history of His Girl Friday. It’s a great account of how works like films outlive their initial moments, a process I’ve studied for television programs in my book using the term “cultural life” […]


For the past two years, I’ve served on the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Public Policy Committee. I encouraged SCMS to form the committee, following the impetus emerging out of the Television Studies Interest Group, as motivated primarily to tackle the issues of copyright and fair use as it impacts the field of film […]


Update: The book will be out soon – details on the Television & American Culture website. My major project for this summer is to finish (or come real close!) a draft of my textbook, Television and American Culture. The goal of the book is to introduce television through a topical structure, using six basic facets […]


A couple of weeks ago I complained about an editorial in The Chronicle of Higher Education that misrepresented copyright policies and ignored fair use altogether. I adapted that post into a letter to the editor, published in this week’s Chronicle. Since The Chronicle puts most of its content behind a pay wall, I’ve reproduced the […]


In today’s New York Times, Mark Helprin argues that copyrights should be eternal, U.S. Constitution be damned. His basic argument: copyrighted materials are intellectual property, and all other property rights are de facto eternal, not expiring into the public domain after an (increasingly approaching eternal) interval. And how dare anybody strip someone of what they […]


One of the things that makes me most cranky about media policy & academia is how quickly educational institutions and academics endorse knee-jerk copyright protectionism as an unquestioned norm, whether or not the law actually upholds such beliefs. The Chronicle of Higher Education, the main trade journal for academics (which also locks its archives to […]