Patricia Aufderheide

Documentary Film: Towards a Research Agenda on Forms, Functions, and Impacts

Recent films such as Fahrenheit 9=11, Supersize Me, An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., and Sicko have generated attention to how documentaries can shape debates over social issues and policy questions. Documentaries are no longer conventionally perceived as a passive experience intended solely for informal learning or entertainment. Instead, with ever increasing frequency, these films are considered part of a larger effort to spark debate, mold public opinion, shape policy, and build activist networks. In addition to these new forms and uses, more traditional public media such as Frontline, Bill Moyers, and POV continue to be influential outlets for public affairs journalism and commentary. Documentaries are also becoming an ever-more-valued commercial enterprise at for-profit cable television networks and a popular amateur genre on YouTube. These quickly changing trends in documentary content, distribution, and reach generate a range of important questions for media scholars and communication researchers to examine. For this special symposium at Mass Communication and Society, we invited theoretically-driven and empiricallygrounded manuscripts that investigate the forms, functions, and impacts of documentary film. We are happy to report that more than 20 manuscripts were submitted in response to the call for papers with 4 eventually accepted for publication. Submissions included works by scholars in communication, political science, and anthropology from the U.S., U.K., and Europe.

Public television and the public sphere

The historical ambiguities over what makes U. S. public television public were foregrounded in the 1988 creation of the Independent Television Serivce. This article analyzes those historical ambiguities in relation to the concept of the public sphere, a social realm separate from economic and state interests. It proposes that public televisions survival depends on its becoming an electronic space within the public sphere.

The impact of copyright permissions culture on the US visual arts community: The consequences of fear of fair use

As digital opportunities emerge in the visual arts—to produce multimedia art and digital scholarship, publish online, and hold online museum exhibitions—old copyright frustrations have worsened in a field where getting permissions is routine. A national survey of 2828 visual arts professionals, combined with 100 in-depth interviews of visual arts practitioners throughout the United States, explored how visual arts professionals use the US copyright doctrine of fair use. Results showed widespread lack of confidence and misconceptions about fair use; resulting exaggerated risk assessment; personal and social relations within the community that deter reliance on fair use; and consequent delays, deformations, and failure to execute mission.

From A to Z: A Conversation on Women’s Filmmaking

M edia critic Pat Aufderheide and film distributor Debra Zimmerman have known each other for almost two decades through the world of independent filmmaking. Since 1983, Zimmerman has been executive director of Women Make Movies (WMM), the foremost distributor of women’s films made in the United States and abroad to theaters, television, schools, and community organizations. Aufderheide, a noted critic and scholar, focuses on independent media and media policy. In this conversation, held at the International Documentary Film festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November 2002, Zimmerman and Aufderheide talk about the cultural production and circulation of women’s films and the relationships among women’s movements, women’s filmmaking and aesthetics, and viewing publics. Pat Aufderheide (PA): How did you get involved in women’s films? Debra Zimmerman (DZ): Well, I am not sure, but I do remember the day I decided to become involved with Women Make Movies. Alice Fix, my women’s studies professor at the State University College in New Paltz, New York, encouraged me to go to a Women’s Weekend in 1977. Ariel Dougherty, the founder of WMM in 1972, and Carol Clement, an early WMM member, were screening a film called Musereel (1975) in a barn. I remember sitting at the screening, surrounded by women, and thinking that I had never had this experience before—I had never seen my experiences reflected back to me on film. It was so powerful that I stopped then and said, “This is what I want to do. I want to feel this way all the time.” I don’t think that anyone can overestimate how important it is to have that experience. Even now, when I attend screenings of our

Piracy and Social Change: Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable discussion draws together researchers with an interest of overcoming purely juridical treatment of piracy in their work. Christopher Kelty and Gabriella Coleman consider the aspects of cyberculture, which conflictually engage with intellectual property rights, through various communities of technology practice, including hackers. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s work on fair use addresses the growing opportunities for creators in the United States to utilize the tradition in their creative fields. Jonas Andersson Schwarz and Patrick Burkart, co-editors of this special issue, have researched user motivations and political activism around copyright and software patent reforms, partially explaining the emergence of dozens of European Pirate Parties, beginning with the Swedish Pirates in 2006.

Copyright, Free Speech, and The Public's Right to Know

This study explores the problems that US journalists face in employing the copyright doctrine of fair use under copyright in their work, and heralds a solution. US copyright policys expansion of monopoly rights since 1976, harshly shrinking the public domain, has forced journalists to understand their fair use rights better. Fair use permits use of copyrighted material without permission or payment, under some circumstances. Without vigorous application of fair use, freedom of the press and its public sphere functions are impaired. Interviews with 81 journalists in a range of media show that journalists receive inadequate and conflicting fair use advice in their education and work environments, and often share misinformation. As a consequence they delay, limit coverage and even choose not to release information. The problem is most acute in emergent digital platforms and in small organizations. Journalists made aware of this problem have taken action to shape a set of principles interpreting their fair use rights. This set of principles offers an opportunity to share journalistic standards for US fair use, following the model of other communities of practice that have been able to do their work more easily and effectively as a result. The US situation is particular to US law, but has international implications.

Shifting policy paradigms and the public interest in the U.S. telecommunications act of 1996

This article offers an analytical overview of pathbreaking U.S. telecommunications reform legislation, as a concrete first step in establishing new industry and regulatory paradigms for telecommunications. It describes key elements of the Act, contrasting them to the status quo ante, in the areas of competition, concentration, and the public interest. It concludes that, while the Act responds to economic, political and technological paradigm shifts, it continues to assert a prominent role for the state in articulating policy, and leaves open an important role for civil society in defining and implementing it terms.

Approaches to Teaching Freedom of Expression: Cross-Cultural Film Study: Seeing inside Out

Freedom of expression is limited by one’s ability to hear a speaker as much as by a speaker’s ability to formulate and deliver a message. Dense cultural, economic, and political contexts of communications systems limit that ability to hear, no matter what the legal promise of the First Amendment. That is why communication, in the words of scholar James Carey (1989), is inevitably “the site of social conflict over the real” (p. 87). But it becomes a site of conflict only among those who see it as such. In the U S . , highly centralized, national, corporate mass media provide a narrowly constricted worldview that in practice narrows the worldview of those whose common link with others in local, national, and global societies are the images purveyed by the mainstream media. As one scholar of mass media regulation put it, several years before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, “To talk of freedom of expression or choice in this context is analogous to describing the Russian people as having freedom of religion because a few churches and synagogues remain open for attendance” (Le Duc, p. 158). And yet it is difficult even to raise the deeper questions of freedom of expression implicit in this cultural shaping of reality with students. One way to do so is to F I R S T AHENDMEIT I

Diversity on U.S. Public and Commercial TV in Authorial and Executive-Produced Social-Issue Documentaries

Where are diverse makers and subjects most likely to be found in U.S. TV documentary? This study compares commercial and public TV series, and also anthology formats (“authorial” series) and executive-produced formats. A content analysis for characters and makers showed that public TV authorial series are more diverse than either commercial or other public TV series. Independent documentaries have diversity value both in commercial and public TV settings.

Copyright Givers and Takers: Mutuality, Altruism and Instrumentalism in Open Licensing

Over the past three decades, open licensing has evolved from hacker culture thought experiment to a transformative force in applied copyright across a range of industries. Yet very little empirical research exists to understand its disparate uses. This article examines social practices and attitudes about open licensing in order to examine the practical experience of creators and consumers who use this tool and in order to assess its value in moderating the negative consequences of extensive copyright. The discussion about the role of open licensing in creative industries and communities tends to be polarized into two vantage points. Either (1) it is a new, altruistic paradigm enabling creative communities to rework copyright to fit their vision for the cultural commons, or (2) it is a radical theft of creative labor, encouraged by Google and other digital industrial powerhouses, to cheat creators out of their share of profits. Both of these rhetorical vantage points presume a monolithic and largely either selfless or unaware base of creative laborers. We analyze data from a series of surveys across a range of creative fields and practices to show that creators employ open licensing for a variety of reasons, including instrumental purposes oriented toward skirting the many impediments created by institutions and law, rather than merely because they are unaware or selfless.