Battling the Copyright Monster

Fiona Morgan Email 06.19.06


Law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins co-wrote and produced the comic book Bound By Law? Tales From the Public Domain. It explores the legal barriers documentary filmmakers in particular must hurdle, or simply avoid.

Aoki, a professor at the University of Oregon who studied art before going to law school, drew the panels. Likenesses of Boyle and Jenkins, both professors at Duke University Law School, act as guides for the story's fictional heroine, a young filmmaker named Akiko.

The story is itself an exercise in fair use, using copyright images and references to documentaries such as Eyes on the Prize and Outfoxed. The book was recently released under a Creative Commons license. A free digital version is available online. Soft Skull Press will publish a print version later this year. Images of some of the comic book's pages are available at the Wired News Bound by Law gallery. Wired News spoke with the three authors by phone recently about the book's creation.

Wired News: Who is the audience for this book?

James Boyle: Our first audience is documentary filmmakers and film students. But we're also trying to reach people who might not think of themselves as documentary filmmakers, people who have video blogs for example, who are using digital tools and editing software to put things online.

But beyond that, there's a larger audience of people who are interested in the effect of copyright on culture, in the free-culture movement, people who are interested in what a world without gatekeepers might look like.

WN: What inspired you to make it a comic book?

Keith Aoki: In my former life as an artist, I was a student of Art Spiegelman, and one of the things he instilled in me is a deep appreciation for the history of comics. Jamie and Jennifer and I are children of the Mad magazine generation, which taught kids to be very distrustful of authority, of ads and hype. That was my first encounter with using copyrighted imagery and turning it around on itself to make a critical comment on the culture.

Boyle: A lot of people imagine that mashup culture is something unique to the digital age, but it goes all the way back to Benjamin Franklin taking popular songs and changing the lyrics to make a comment or a protest about a political situation. The notion that you might need to take a copyrighted, or in that case widely recognized, piece of art and use it in your own work goes all the way through our culture. It's just that in the digital realm it happens so much more and so much faster. The technology lets more people do it more often and reach a wider audience.

WN: Why did you decide to focus on documentary film in this book? What is it about that art form in particular that makes it an especially good topic?


Boyle: The history of our culture is in large part the history of a mass of copyrighted material. The question is, are we going to put our own history off-limits to the documentarians, the historians of the future? Copyright is supposed to encourage the dissemination of knowledge, but in those cases it does exactly the opposite.

WN: In the book, you talk about copyright law being out of balance. Can you explain that?

Boyle: There are several ways this has happened. For one thing, copyright now lasts longer than it ever has before, so anyone who's telling the history of American culture after 1923 is using stuff that's copyrighted. That's a long time ago. A lot of people who were working in the past were working under certain rules, knowing that work would soon be in the public domain. Well, we're unfortunately unique as a generation completely cut off from the past 80 years because of the continual extension of copyright terms.

The second thing is that there are a lot of claims under copyright that really have nothing to do with copyright law. This is what Larry Lessig calls the "permissions culture," where people ask permission for the use of tiny fragments that end up in the background of their films or music out of fear or under threat of lawsuit.

And the third thing is the technology. In the '50s, it was quite hard to violate copyright. You needed a printing press or a movie studio. Now all of us make copies of things all the time.

A fourth thing that cuts the other way is the fear-and-loathing syndrome. There's a whole generation of filmmakers and digital creators whose only experience of copyright is as a hassle, as an obstruction, as a cease-and-desist letter preventing them from making or distributing their work. They see copyright as a pointless labyrinth they have to make their way through to make their art. We actually view ourselves as copyright defenders, showing how copyright is supposed to work. We're saying this imbalance could cause us to lose the next generation of artists, if they think of copyright as worthless.

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