A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”?

The Duke Center For the Study of the Public Domain has this story in a new comic book available for sale or for free download. The Heroine’s name, AKIDO, in this story means ‘the way of harmony’ but the story is anything but the story of harmony….

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This entry was posted by Kate Spelman on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Copyrights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.