Creative Commons: Can film directors use open licenses to share their work?
2 min to read

Creative Commons: Can film directors use open licenses to share their work?

Date
29 March 2016

Earlier this month, Martin von Haller, partner in Bird & Bird Copenhagen office, hosted a mini seminar on Creative Commons (CC) in Copenhagen. Martin helped form the Danish branch of CC, an organisation dedicated to creating tools for artists, researchers and other creative souls to share their work using an open license mind-set.

The mini seminar, co-hosted by The association of Danish Film Directors, addressed the possibility of the use of CC licenses for movie directors, focusing on the legal and business aspects of sharing movies more openly. Martin was joined by two co-speakers, the Swedish director Simon Klose who made the documentary TPBAFK – The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard and Danish journalist and director Henrik Moltke, the man behind the documentary Good Copy Bad Copy.

After the speakers’ presentations the whole group debated the possibilities of using CC when sharing their work. Within the movie field, CC has primarily been used to share documentaries.

Amongst other things, the seminar addressed the possibilities of sharing feature films via CC and the legal aspects of this were debated heavily. The many types of IP rights and large financial sums involved in feature films were seen as a constraint by some. However, it was observed that films being distributed more openly reached a significantly higher number of viewers, which could be seen as a distinct advantage, especially for smaller productions.

Furthermore, the mixing of both ordinary movie distribution and CC-distribution for different parts of a movie production was seen as an upside, e.g. trailers, teasers and soundtracks could be shared via an open-license thus allowing the movie to generate hype and reach a larger number of interested viewers.

Take a look at CC’s English website here: https://creativecommons.org/

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Written by
Martin von Haller
Martin von Haller
Martin is recognised for his solid legal skills and as an innovative thought leader and strategist within the IT industry. He is a partner in Bird & Bird's International Tech and Comms Group and is based in Denmark. Martin is one of Denmark’s leading IT lawyers with almost 20 years’ experience of advising Danish and international organisations, including large blue chip companies on legal and commercial matters in connection with IT in a wide sense. He is considered a pioneer with respect to legal aspects of Online Technology Solutions (Ecommerce, internet and web services), Cyber and IT security, open source and open data and use of other open licence forms such as Creative Commons.
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