Legal Research

"Happy Birthday" Gets Cut?

By turquhart

Documentary filmmakers may soon have cause not to say ?Cut!? every time they are filming at a party where everyone is singing ?Happy Birthday.? For a group of scholars who ?hope to breathe new life into a legal doctrine called ?fair use,?? (WSJ) a comic book?a project of Duke University?s Center for the Study of the Public Domain?might just do the trick.

Akiko, the filmmaker and star of Bound by Law?, takes to the streets of New York City to film a day of life in Gotham, capturing everything from singing street vendors to Homer Simpson projected from a television in his favorite hangout?a bar. The filming is running along quite smoothly until Akiko runs into a roadblock called: The Doctrine of Fair Use.

The intended purpose of this comic book is to help budget-challenged documentary filmmakers make sense of copyright law and encourage them to ?start exercising their rights and even be prepared to take the occasional case to court.?

Posted by Toni Urquhart

Full post as published by FSU College of Law Library Blog on February 03, 2006 (boomark / email).