The starting point of this article is a short documentary film that I and five colleagues produced in the course of the Business of Film module at Queen Mary University of London's Intellectual Property Law LLM Programme. During the process of production, we faced some borderline issues regarding our unauthorized uses of others’ copyright works. When we put ourselves into the copyright's author's shoes, three problems arose regarding our use of possible limitations and exceptions: the lack of guidance; the fear of liability; and the unharmonized status of limitations and exceptions at an international level. This article examines these problems from a copyright policy perspective and invites documentary festivals to undertake a mission of guiding new documentary directors through the complex, unharmonized world of copyright limitations and exceptions.
Documenting the copyright sphere: can festivals solve the problem of copyright clearance for documentaries?