Copyright Criminals Screenings
Throughout the month of September, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) will celebrate the fifth year of its popular Community Cinema program — a monthly national screening series showcasing documentaries on compelling social issues from the Emmy® Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens. Community Cinema connects community-based organizations with independent film enthusiasts, youth and families by providing free screenings, discussions and resources on important social issues in association with public television stations in more than 50 cities around the country.
Future of Music Coalition will participate in select screenings of two important documentaries, D TOUR and COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS.
COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS examines the creative and commercial value of musical sampling, including the related debates over artistic expression, copyright law, and money. Produced by University of Iowa professor Kembew McLeod and Benjamin Franzen, this documentary traces the rise of hip-hop from the urban streets of New York to its current status as a multibillion-dollar industry. Sampling, or riffing, is as old as music itself, but as technologies developed in the 1980s and ’90s that made it easier to sample existing sound recordings – and when record label company lawyers got involved – everything changed. Years before people started downloading music off the internet, hip-hop sampling sparked a debate about copyright, creativity and technological change, and the debate still rages today.
FMC has worked closely with McLeod since 2007 examining the legal and social challenges presented by this ever-evolving art form.Creative License, a book which includes interviews with nearly 100 participants in the sampling culture, as well as a thorough economic and legal analysis of the underpinnings of sampling, will be published by Duke University Press in 2010.
Click here for a current list of screening dates for COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS
Copyright Criminals is a co-production of ITVS and will premiere in the 2009-2010 season of the Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary series “Independent Lens.”
McLeod will also appear at the eighth Future of Music Policy Summit, which takes place at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. on October 4-6, 2009. Co-presented by ITVS’s Community Cinema program and the Georgetown College Film and Media Studies Initiative, COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS will be screened on Sunday, October 4 from 5-7 PM; on Monday, October 5, McLeod and Creative License co-author Peter DiCola will join Tony Berman (Founder, Berman Entertainment and Technology Law), clearance expert Hope Carr, Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee and Peter Jaszi (Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic, American University) for a discussion about their research and possible ways to make the sample license clearance process more efficient.
For more information on FMC’s work on sampling, click here.
