Alternate Focus needs a law student

Being a low-budget 501(C)3 and lacking a team of lawyers, Alternate Focus, www.alternatefocus.org, the San Diego-based non-profit documentary cable access/satellite/web show I work with, we have often bumbled around the digital rights management world. But despite a need to become more diligent in some areas, so far it seems we have managed to fly under the radar and use a broad interpretation of fair use. Generally, the people/organizations we acquire footage. music, images, etc from are quite supportive of our mission and happy to contribute assets without extensive contracts and such. Also because our goal is to broadcast our programs as an educational tool and voice for underrepresented groups and viewpoints, we don’t have to concern ourselves with who else might be using our work. However, we do use on blip.tv te creative commons

Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

However, since we do plan to expand to broader distribution outlets and step up the overall legitimacy and quality of the programs we will need to tighten up. About a quarter of our shows are sourced from other producers/organizations so I think we’ll need to update our standard contract to cover distribution rights for our normal cable access outlets, satellite, and perhaps most importantly, to allow us to place videos on multiple web pages, some under our control and others not. Additionally, we’d like to add to our web archives many shows that we’re produced and licensed only for cable access distribution. This may take some serious emailing and faxing.

We will also need to do some serious study about using news footage clips from mainstream media outlets and how fair use dances around this issue. From what I’ve seen on their corporate webpages the tolerable range of fair use seems quite small though I assume that’s because they want to get paid. Again, because we’re frequently exploring topics involving powerful forces (Blackwater, Israeli conservatives, etc) we need to ensure we don’t leave ourselves vulnerable to swarm of ravenous lawyers looking to make an example of a small indy media group.