The Future of Ideas
Chapter One
Davis Guggenheim is a film director. He has produced a range of movies,
some commercial, some not. His passion, like his father's before, is
documentaries, and his most recent, and perhaps best, film, The First
Year, is about public school teachers in their first year of
teaching-a Hoop Dreams for public education.
In the process of making a film, a director must "clear rights." A film
based on a copyrighted novel must get the permission of the copyright holder. A
song in the opening credits requires the rights of the artist performing the
song. These are ordinary and reasonable limits on the creative process, made
necessary by a system of copyright law. Without such a system, we would not
have anything close to the creativity that directors such as Guggenheim have
produced.
But what about the stuff that appears in the film incidentally? Posters on a
wall in a dorm room, a can of Coke held by the "smoking man," an
advertisement on a truck driving by in the background? These too are creative
works. Does a director need permission to have these in his or her film?
"Ten years ago," Guggenhe ... read full excerpt from The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World ebook
