When advising MFA students producing video documentaries, faculty members in the Dept. of Television and Radio at Brooklyn College have, for many years, cautioned strongly against copyright infringements within student works. They discouraged use of any part of previously produced media work, from a few bars of recorded music, to still images, to a few seconds of news footage. For the most part students were commanded by lawsuit-fearing faculty members to steer clear of anything that might possibly be questioned at any point in the future by absolutely anyone interested in scrutinizing not-for-profit, student-produced films.
I always felt the fear factor was higher than it needed to be, and that fair use provisions of the U.S. copyright code were not examined and discussed as widely as they should be among the students and faculty. In part this is understandable because, as the Utne Reader’s recent online article, “How Fair use Got its Groove Back,” points out, fair use provisions are vague, and most of us in media education are encouraged to fear for our legal lives. As a faculty adviser myself, I’ve been more liberal in my encouragement that MFA students include those few seconds of footage or that still image where it would help make an important point in the documentary. After all, as author Julie Hanus suggests in the Utne piece, how can you engage in (very necessary) media criticism if you cannot invoke the media productions themselves? It really can’t be done.
Educators need to be bold, and need to challenge media producers as well as outdated copyright law itself. After all, media scholar and producer Sut Jhally boldly challenged big corporate media when he produced his first video in the Dreamworlds series with the Media Education Foundation. The Dreamworlds productions use clips from years of televised music videos to scrutinize the sexualized images of girls and women. At first MTV went after Jhally, but their legal case essentially went nowhere. It was a gigantic coup for media educators and critics, but it didn’t quell the fears of most media educators. Too bad. Someone needed to take this on as a full-time project. Especially now that digital media are fodder for so much more media, and so much more media criticism.
Now we have that project. American University’s Center for Social Media (see their document “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use”) is taking on the whole issue of fair use and copyright law on behalf of media educators and artists. People like the Center’s Patricia Aufderheide and Temple University’s Renee Hobbs are taking bold steps on behalf of those of us who are impassioned by the need for media literacy, which includes the need to use examples of media language to critique that language, with the goal of developing critical faculties among the youth and adults we’re committed to educating. And that’s our commitment at the LAMP.
There’s a lot at stake here, and in this media saturated environment, we’ve got to be bold, not cowed. We’re media literacy educators. If we can’t take on big media ourselves, how can we possibly teach others to do the same?
–Katherine Fry
