The blog for aspiring & established filmmakers of independent films. by ted hope.

“a great day for documentary filmmaking & for the future of books”

Variety recently reported:

“Documentary filmmakers have won a ruling from the U.S. Copyright Office that allows them to legally break the encryption codes of DVDs and online streaming content to obtain clips for their projects.

The material still must fall under the “fair use” exemption of copyright law, but the decision by Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante was hailed as a victory for non-fiction filmmakers seeking high-quality clips for their movies. The decision also allows educators and multimedia e-book authors, as well as makers of non-commercial videos, to circumvent copy-protection software to obtain such clips, although the use has to be limited in scope.” (Read the whole article)

I have long dreamed of a day when I have a wealth of titles akin to Adam Curtis’s THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES and Sophie Fiennes’ THE PERVERTS GUIDE TO CINEMA.  I love video essays and could appreciate a whole lot more of them.

Culture is built upon itself.  We need to be able to remix it.  It just can’t be taken — we need to use it to add to the dialogue.  We return value when we use it fairly.

Although this ruling doesn’t advance Fair Use, at least it gets rid of a substantial barrier.

 

Every Aspiring Filmmakers new best friend.

Meet Ted

Hope offers his unique perspective on how to make movies while keeping your integrity intact and how to create a sustainable business enterprise out of that art while staying true to yourself.

Meet Ted

Ted Hope is a “holistic film producer”: he aims to be there from the beginning and then forever after, involved in every aspect of a film’s life cycle and ecosystem, as committed to engineering serendipity as preventing problems, as obsessed with lifting the good into the great, as he is…

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