About a year and a half ago, several folks involved in trying to create more breathing room for fair use in the documentary film business worked together to come up with a set of principles that they believed should represented the scope of fair use within that industry. They published these principles as Best Practices in Fair Use. At the time this signaled, along with the development of some divergent court holdings with respect to the scope of fair use in different creative contexts, that maybe a "genre by genre" understanding of fair use would evolve, or should evolve.
Now two additional developments reported at Info/Law � Even Better News on Fair Use and Insurers confirm the value of this approach. The Best Practices are being adopted as standards for insuring productions. Insurers are one of the conservative "gatekeepers" whose demands for reduced risk drive development of the permission culture.
Responsible statements of fair use best practices for different segments of the entertainment, artistic and musical businesses offer real hope that we can back away from the precipice of the permission culture, where every single little piece of anyone else's work included in a new work must be cleared. Of course, clearing everything is more often than not impossible, which results in a reduction in the creation of new works or their scope, precisely the opposite result from what we expect from copyright. But this result is not surprising when the rights of owners are interpreted so broadly as to exclude any use of others' materials whatsoever without permission.
A big hand to those who have worked to create the first set of Best Practices and encourage their adoption more widely within the documentary film industry. Now we need to see similar efforts among other segments of our creative industries. Closely related to this is the magnificent effort to encourage artists, musicians and all creators to "tag" their online works with Creative Commons licenses that make explicit the range of rights the creator gives the public, affirmatively enabling sharing reuse and remixing.
