16 March 2006

USA law texts



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 new 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.

This book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

This comic book was made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. It is a project of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which focuses on the delicate balance between intellectual property and the public domain - the realm of material that is free to use without permission or payment. To read about some of the Center's projects in areas ranging from neglected diseases to music sampling, click here.

Plain old html - Read the book!
Flash animation with page flipping and a magnifier tool. Requires flash player ( download flash player ) and high-speed connection, loading make take a few minutes
PDF- the entire comic in one downloadable file (8MB) (16MB)



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