I’ve been watching (and haven’t quite finished) the 2009 documentary, Tales from the Script, which I find very interesting from an IP point of view. It’s basically a collection of interviews and interesting/frank war stories from Hollywood writers about their experiences preparing, selling, and working with producers and directors on scripts for movies and TV shows. One really interesting thing is that in the part of the movie that I have seen so far (about the first 2/3) no one has really talked much about IP law, notably copyright. People have talked about the creative process, the economic drivers in the industry, the financial realities of selling and producing creative works etc. These are all the kinds of things we talk about when we discuss economic justifications for copyright law. However, many of these writers clearly aren’t motivated purely or solely by economic rewards and, even those who are, express significant concerns about the authorial integrity of their works in production processes where others are changing the original creative vision. I know none of these points is particularly novel in debates about copyright, but the documentary is interesting because it brings a lot of these issues together (without specifically talking in IP law terms) and gives many frank first hand authorial perspectives – often difficult information to get a hold of in practice.