The Documentary Film Program provides filmmakers with information about fair use, access to insurance for liability arising out of copyright litigation, and access to lawyers who will defend copyright claims pro bono or at reduced rates.
The Powder & the Glory tells the story of two of the first highly successful women entrepreneurs in America, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein. One hundred years ago these women immigrated to the United States and, starting with next to nothing, created what is today the $150 billion global health and beauty industry. They lived and worked only blocks apart but by design they never met. They were fierce rivals.
Pat Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi and their colleagues at American University's Center for Social Media have released a fantastic new study on creativity on the web -- and the threat that overly-aggressive copyright enforcement and so-called "anti-piracy" software pose to free speech.
Read the full study here, and view a slew of videos that represent the creativity that digital media has unleashed.
The power of simple graphics on the Web is hard to beat.
Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff lays out what's at stake for consumers if they choose wisely, poorly or let others choose for them.
Henry Jenkins at M.I.T. put up an excellent post about Moral Kombat, one of the first films we reviewed as part of our then-new (now not-so-new but significantly bigger) Documentary Film Program. Read the post. See the film, which is going into previews now.
Shocking and informative, SPLIT: A DIVIDED AMERICA takes a behind the scenes look at the partisanship dominating our politics. Balancing candid discussions with citizens coast to coast and commentary from some of the sharpest minds analyzing government and society today, it’s a cross country investigation of democracy in America.
Susan Retik and Patti Quigley are two ordinary soccer moms living in the affluent suburbs of Boston until tragedy strikes. Rather than turning inwards, grief compels these women to focus on the country where the terrorists who took their husbands’ lives were trained: Afghanistan. Over the course of two years, as they cope with loss and struggle to raise their families as single mothers, these extraordinary women dedicate themselves to empowering Afghan widows whose lives have been ravaged by decades of war, poverty and oppression – factors they consider to be the root causes of terrorism.
Read the New York Magazine review
Read the Variety Magazine review
Read the ABC News review
Read the Cape Cod Times review
Read the All Movie Guide/NYTimes.com review
Read the Flick Filosopher review
Read the Boston Globe review
Debate Team is a documentary exploring the weird subculture of competitive college debate. Competitors battle at 360 words per minute, hauling around mountains of evidence called “cards” and nearly every debate ends in global nuclear annihilation.
In 2005, nearly 200 teams converged on San Francisco State to compete in the National Championship. The documentary follows four teams, from Michigan State, Harvard, West Georgia, and Berkeley in their quest for the national title.
What emerges is not simply a chronicle of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, but a more disturbing examination into the nature of competition itself and the American fetish with championships and champions.
Debate Team is sponsored by Film Arts.
In March of 2004 a Pennsylvania filmmaker was activated with his National Guard unit and deployed to Iraq. During the next twelve months he would document his unique experiences as he and his platoon were tasked with the politically charged mission of searching for the infamous weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The search would take them from the heart of Baghdad to rural Iraqi farms.
Land Of Confusion offers a never-before seen account of working with the then secretive Iraq Survey Group (ISG) as they travel throughout the country searching for evidence that Saddam had the WMDs. The film reveals the extraordinary perspective of soldiers on the ground in Iraq, as recorded by one of their own and goes far beyond what the conventional mainstream media shows audiences about the war.
View the trailer: QuickTime 6 or QuickTime 7
Land of Confusion will premiere at the Florida Film Festival in Orlando in February 2008. Land of Confusion was one of 10 documentaries selected for screening out of over 300 submissions to the FFF, one of the largest film festivals in the United States.
On October 12 we filed Floyd Webb's Opposition to Plaintiff's Motion for Preliminary Injunction. Plaintiff, in his motion, asked the court to enjoin Floyd Webb from using on his website or in his documentary film any copyrighted materials or trademarks the Plaintiff claims to own.
Here is a very nice plug for CIS from one of the most respected and accomplished copyright lawyers around -- Bill Patry. In it, he notes my recent article about Sean Combs in Slate, and reminds us that Combs was also at the center of another copyright controversy about controlled composition clauses. Thanks, Bill, for the kind words.
