Bill McGeveran recounts an important milestone in the application of the fair use doctrine: An E&O insurance carrier has written a policy on a work — a documentary film — whose use of copyrighted material is supported by the fair use doctrine, as elaborated by the Statement on Best Practices prepared by the Center for Social Media at American University (with significant help from documentary filmmakers themselves and the IP faculty at the Washington College of Law at AU), and as applied in this instance by a lawyer willing to put his or her own firm’s E&O policy on the line.
E&O Coverage for Fair Use
Posted by Mike Madison · February 14th, 2007 · 1 Comment
Tags: Law & Technology
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1 IP and Insurance at madisonian.net: a weblog about law, technology, and society // Feb 23, 2007 at 1:11 pm
[...] In copyright, then, all the world’s judicial and legislative correctives to over- and under-protection can accomplish only so much unless insurance markets cooperate. And, finally, they seem to be starting to. I and others recently blogged about a breakthrough in insurance coverage for documentary filmmakers who want and need to rely on the fair use doctrine. Today, Larry Lessig is announcing a major leap forward in the same direction: A partnership among an insurer, the Stanford Fair Use Project, and a network of practitioners willing to discount their rates to documentarians, which assures a practical infrastructure is at the ready to enable carrier reliance on documentarian fair use practice. This is awesome, and it’s a magnificent example of how academic IP can complement IP practice and activism. Congratulations to Larry, to the Board of the project, and to the participants in the Statement on Best Practices in Fair Use prepared at American University, which supplies the conceptual backbone. Larry Lessig once wrote that fair use means the right to hire a lawyer. That’s still true, but that lawyer now has much better and less expensive tools to work with. [...]