A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the Rocky theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? Eyes on the Prize, the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound by Law? reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property, and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.
Readers can download a pdf of the book here.
Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain, New Expanded Edition
Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins
Foreword by Davis Guggenheim Introduction by Cory Doctorow
80. pages (September 2008)
Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins
Foreword by Davis Guggenheim Introduction by Cory Doctorow
80. pages (September 2008)
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| [ISBN13 ] | |
Paperback - $8.95 | 0-8223-4418-1 |
| [ISBN13 978-0-8223-4418-6] | |
“This wonderful, funny, and clever comic makes a very complex issue simple. . . . I keep a copy in my desk.”—Davis Guggenheim, Oscar-winning director of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth
“An indispensable guide for the perplexed (ain’t we all!) in this postmodern information age.”—Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize–winning comic book artist“A knockout comic book about fair use and filmmaking. Bound by Law? riffs expertly on classic comic styles, from the Crypt Keeper to Mad Magazine, superheroes to Understanding Comics, and lays out a sparkling, witty, moving and informative story about how the eroded public domain has made documentary filmmaking into a minefield.”—Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the blog BoingBoing.net
“Bound by Law? stars Akiko, a curvaceous, muscular filmmaker (think Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft with spiky hair) planning to shoot a documentary about a day in the life of New York City. . . . [It] translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’—all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.”—Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online
“Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Akiko, the fair-use freedom fighter! Akiko is heroine of a new comic book . . . created by three law profs who worry that a growing ‘permissions culture’ is hurting creativity by overprotecting it.”—William Triplett, Variety Weekly
“A fantastic approach for introducing students to copyright law . . . and a must for professional development.”—Esther Sinofsky, Booklist
“Will a spiky-haired, camera-toting super-heroine . . . restore decency and common sense to the world of creative endeavor? . . . [Bound by Law?] exercises the fair-use doctrine in a romp through popular culture.”—Paul Bonner, The Herald-Sun (Durham, NC)
Keith Aoki is a longtime cartoonist and Professor of Law of the University of California, Davis, School of Law. He is the author of Seed Wars: Controversies and Cases on Plant Genetic Resources and Intellectual Property (forthcoming). James Boyle is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke University Law School, a founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and the author of Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. Jennifer Jenkins is Director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, where she heads its Arts Project and teaches a seminar on intellectual property, the public domain, and free speech.
Related subjects:
Legal Studies
Film & Television Studies
Activism