Archive for the ‘Fair Use’ Category

I’m excited to announce the publication of my latest book, The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image. [Update: as of 2019, the content is open access!] It’s a gratifying publication in many ways. It is the first project that I have co-authored with my good friend and colleague Christian Keathley, and as such, it was […]


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 […]


Lately I’ve become more and more intrigued by Digital Humanities as a subfield/movement/trend/etc. within academia, in large part because the people who are actively driving much of DH are super engaging & welcoming via social networks like Twitter and various blogs. As I am committed to open access publishing, public-facing scholarship, and innovative modes of […]


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 […]


I’m writing from the grading bunker, which seems like a fine place to contemplate the purpose of assignments we give our students. Usually, my assignments are fairly conventional in both form and goal, looking to synthesize specific ideas from the course in a way that allows students to apply them to an object or topic […]


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 […]


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 […]


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 […]