Digital Filmmaking

Clearances and Copyrights in Film

July 21, 2009 July 21, 2009 Clearances and copyrights are important for all independent filmmakers. Every producer, writer, and anyone who has anything to do with acquiring or clearing rights need to know about clearance issues. Copyright law is important to artists because it determines who owns what in the entertainment industry. It attempts to make decisions with absolute authority over who controls a project at every stage, and who is in the best position to reap the rewards of a project. Because it deals with intangibles, written contracts are more important in the entertainment industry than in most others. Also, lawyers are unfortunately indispensable. A comprehensive book called Clearance and Copyright: Everything You Need To Know For Film and Television (3rd edition) by Michael C. Donaldson, considered a bible among filmmakers and others who deal with the filmmaking industry, was referred to me by my son John, a writer and producer in Los Angeles for documentaries and television. Clearance and Copyright deals with fair use of copyright material, sets and set dressing, characters and costumes, personal releases, film titles, chain of title, obtaining insurance, and much more. Donaldson’s book is used in over 50 film schools across the United States, and has become the standard reference book for the industry. Donaldson, a Los Angeles-based entertainment attorney, has been fighting for independent filmmakers for over thirty years. As former president of International Documentary Association, he organized and led the Documentary Credits Coalition, which negotiated with the cable networks to prevent the wholesale migration of credits from the screen to the Internet. He notes that the single most common error he deals with in his practice is when “two friends start kicking around an idea and get very excited about the idea and how much fun it is to be creating this thing together. They start developing a project without any agreement about what happens to it when they are finished. More importantly, what mechanism do they use when they are further down the road on the project and when their visions for the project diverge?” He says that friendships break up and all too often end up in hostile disputes with everyone involved feeling taken advantage of. He strongly recommends that artists jot down the specifics right from the beginning, even if it is on a napkin. Co-creating a project is a business partnership. He also shares in his book that it is better to register your work with the Writers Guild of America in Los Angeles or New York than to mail a copy of your original work to yourself in a sealed envelope. Jeremy de Beer’s, Associate Professor of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, teaches Digital Music Law has a blog on copyright culture and documentary films. A panel of expert speakers will gather next Wednesday at the University of Ottawa to talk about copyright culture. According to de Beer’s, documentary filmmakers in Canada and around the world increasingly face great obstacles to create their art because of copyright law, policy and practice. In addition, according to the Techdirt Blog there is a growing concern that copyright laws are killing the documentary. Documentary filmmakers run the risk of getting charged with copyright infringement or enduring the difficult and expensive process of securing the rights. Some documentary filmmakers say that half their budget goes toward rights clearances, if they can even get them. Documentaries are supposed to document what is actually happening, but what’s happening is that they can’t document many things without first paying for the permission to do so. As you can tell, this topic is BIG and complex and deserves attention by all people involved with filmmaking.