The School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California has been under fire all year from film student who are frustrated at having to assign copyright in all their works to the school. That means that student filmmakers can’t even put their stuff online to help them get work when they graduate, or even get feedback from off-campus film-lovers.
My student Cameron Parkins (I’ve just finished a year of teaching at USC on a Fulbright Chair) has written an excellent essay for my class critiquing the film school’s policy and proposing an alternative: students should be free to choose to license their works for redistribution under Creative Commons.
Cameron makes an excellent argument for this case, and has followed it up with an online petition to the film-school to overturn this bad policy.
USC SCA stands at an impasse. Conflicting approaches to copyright present various
options for SCA as it reevaluates is IP policy, and it would do well to adopt (and
encourage) CC-licensed IP option for its students. SCA’s most glaring fault is in its
discordance with the IP policies of other, similar, film programs through out the U.S.,
especially those in Los Angeles who face the same industrial constraints (LMU, UCLA,
CalArts).SCA’s goals should be to foster creativity and openness. Its IP policy should reflect this
by being inline with the sprit of artistic creation and the spirit of academic inquiry. Its
current policy represents neither of these, but rather a corporate, non-academic approach
to content ownership. This must be remedied if SCA wishes to remain a leader in its field
and continue to offer its students a cutting-edge education – both technologically and
ideologically.
Link to petition,
Link to white-paper
Update: Janna sez, “I’ve been programming manager at USC’s Trojan Vision Student TV Station for 2 years, and the post about the Creative Commons petition at the USC Cinema School made me think of our horrible, archaic Intellectual Property Agreement. Many students come to the programming department to pitch new shows, and lately more and more student producers have come through needing barely any equipment, personnel or money (most get next to no funding, if any) from Trojan Vision, only the opportunity to air on our closed-circuit cable and web stream, as well as using the Trojan Vision name to get insurance and shooting permits on campus they would otherwise have to pay for outside of class assignments. But even a show that doesn’t require any of those things is required to sign over the intellectual property rights for their show to Trojan Vision, and as more and more older reruns are shown on air, the ownership basically become permanent (They supposedly expire if the show hasn’t been played in over a year). So these student producers must get Trojan Vision permission (which they don’t) to put clips up on YouTube, and can’t shop their pilot around to networks or studios. And these agreements even pre-date Trojan Vision becoming a part of the Cinema school’s wondrous bureaucracy (this version still hasn’t been updated to include the SCA name).”
