Willful Infringement

"If sampling isn't fair use, then all of jazz is illegal," says one interviewee in Greg Hittelman's cogent examination of the state of copyright law at the dawn of the 21st century. In today's iron-fisted copyright environment, Andy Warhol would be slapped with a trademark infringement suit before the paint dried on one of his Campbell's soup can reproductions. Willful Infringement questions some of what is considered holy writ in copyright law (interviewee Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Copyrights & Copywrongs, points out that just because the NFL tells viewers and listeners during every broadcast game that any account or description is unauthorized, it doesn't mean the NFL has a legal leg to stand on should you decide to email a friend about a third quarter score). While the impetus for this mostly talking-head documentary came from producer Jed Horovitz's battle with Disney over his company Video Pipeline's service of providing trailers to video stores (which was okay until VP started offering streaming previews online), Horovitz's fight is not the focus of the film at all (the DVD also includes the documentary short Mickey & Me, covering that subject). Rather, we meet artists in the music industry sued for sampling (it's alright to quote from books, but not songs), clowns who have to be very careful that their animal balloons don't resemble any Magic Kingdom characters, and professors threatened for presenting papers related to defeating copy-protection features of digital media (under the restrictive Digital Millennium Copyright Act, fair use never becomes an issue since the law is broken the second you bypass any security encryption--even if you are simply making a personal copy of something you legally purchased for your own use). Sure to spark discussions amongst librarians and educators (with interviewees including Stanford's Lawrence Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred Lohmann; not to mention--in the bonus "20 Questions" segment--past ALA President Nancy Kranich), Willful Infringement raises important questions. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)