Why is Fair Use critical to documentary film?
Fair Use is critical to documentary film because that medium explores and discusses important social, cultural and historical issues. It is often impossible to discuss these issues effectively without reference to the historical material that illustrates, depicts and documents them. A tremendous amount of that material is under copyright. Accordingly, copyright can present a very significant barrier to the creation of many documentary films. While documentary filmmakers may be able to solve this problem by obtaining permission to use copyrighted material from the copyright owner, this solution is imperfect and often ineffective. First, copyright owners often demand licensing fees that are prohibitively expensive relative to the documentary film budget. Second, the problem is exacerbated where the subject of the film requires extensive use of copyrighted clips due not only to total cost, but the time, effort and expense of tracking down owners and asking for permission in the first plac
