Film School Copyright
Whilst being a long-standing cornerstone of artistic industries and practice (at least since the Industrial Revolution) the notion of Copyright - that of owning an idea, of intellectual property - is now in the digital age facing a barrage of assaults from all directions.
When our daily lives are infused with digital-machines that have one, and only one purpose, to COPY, DUPLICATE and DISTRIBUTE, can any traditional notion of automatic and restrictive copyright have any real relevance?
This issue is at the heart of the debate that finds resonance in names and acronyms such as Napster, P2P, DRM, Torrents and more importantly in movements such as Free Culture, FOSS and Creative Commons.
The idea of Owning and idea is a powerful one and whilst there is a certain degree of nobility in the core concept of owning an idea there is a fundamental disconnect when it comes to enforcing that paradigm and the arbitrary forced restriction of that ownership.
Creative Commons is a copyright structure that allows creators to choose their rights, to choose for themselves how their creation can be used. A concept painfully simple and yet astoundingly challenging to a traditional legal sense of copyright. A legal framework that provides no flexibility and is profoundly in opposition to the technology designed to do nothing but copy and distribute.
This idea of ownership and the Controlling of Ideas is interleaved into the framework of a great many of the worlds Film Schools. Alarming to many and not at all surprising to many others, is the fact that a great many of the worlds educational institutions for cinematic arts enforce a very protective, isolationist and insular copyright culture. A culture where the institution owns all creative works made by the students. This idea flowed on from long-standing academic university ideas of the institution owning the intellectual capital of its academics.
The simple argument being that since the production of a work was done under the facilities and provisions of the institution (and by proxy the idea that the work could not of would not have otherwise been possible) the institution owns the proceeds of that work.
Theres no question that there is merit in this argument but in the case of a creative institution such as a Film School it begs the question - What does the Film School gain from controlling the copyright?
Institutions such as the Australian Film TV and Radio School (AFTRS) seem to still function on the old framework of owning student work; ownership which is not passed on to the students. The argument is much like that of Production Studios where he who puts up the money and the facilities OWNS the product rather that the creative workers who made the product. The result is a huge back catalogue of student films that AFTRS posses but which have never and will probably never see the light of day in a public way. Will AFTRS ever put them on YouTube...? Heaven forbid NO, someone might actually watch them..!
AFTRS would likely make the argument that it is protecting the artist and the artists rights and the artists profession; but in practice it seems they are only protecting the artist from an Audience.
What would AFTRS really loose from releasing the content of decades of diligent creativity? Revenue? Their canon of student films arent exactly making money sitting on a shelf.
What would AFTRS gain if they released the copyright back to the filmmakers; or better and more radical yet, licensed it all under Creative Commons and released it to the word...?
What would they gain? Massive exposure, massive brand awareness, a dense creative contribution, huge international profile building among the indie filmmaker communities.... This is the potential gain.
The University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts is among the most prominent film schools in the world and they too, like AFTRS, had a long-standing, deeply conservative and overtly insular approach to copyright of student works. They, like AFTRS, owned wholly and solely the copyright to their students films. And yet a transformation has taken place.... The USC
Free-Culture association has released a white paper profoundly shaking up the traditionally arrogant and obstructive copyright policy of the USC film school.
You can read the old policy here.
They described the extant policy as a:
non-academic, corporate approach, to content ownership, and is one that is detrimental to both SCA students and SCA itself.
Their white paper (
which you can read here) makes a raft of recommendations and finishes with this statement:
SCAs goals should be to foster creativity and openness. Its IP policy should reflect this by being inline with the sprit of artistic creation and the spirit of academic inquiry. Its current policy represents neither of these, but rather a corporate, non-academic approach to content ownership. This must be remedied if SCA wishes to remain a leader in its field and continue to offer its students a cutting-edge education both technologically and ideologically.The opportunity that has been afforded me in taking up the position of
Head of Technological Arts at the International Film School Sydney is that, as a new school only having been open for a couple of years, the slate was clean and free of baggage and the detritus of old thinking and old mentalities. The opportunity existed to think differently about how a film school could and should work and engage with the digital age. The first small step was the relinquish all copyright on student films. The films are owned by the students with the school retaining just two conditions - to have our name and logo in the credits and to be able to use excerpts from the student films in promotion of the school. Student works, trailers and showreels uploaded online for promotional and showcase purposes are licensed under Creative Commons non-commercial, no-derivative. We WANT online users to share the works, to embed them on their own sites, to pass them around. The more they do the more our filmmakers talents are exposed to the world and the more or schools profile is built.
The perspective we hold, one seemingly shared by the Free Culture association of USC, is that there is absolutely nothing for the International Film School Sydney to gain by holding onto the archaic copyright ideas. And there is simply everything to gain by opening our students films to the world.
Posted by Matt Kelland on July 14, 2008 at 10:31 PM EST #