reports

The result of more than a year of research -- including many firsthand stories from artists, historians, Web bloggers, and others -- "Will Fair Use Survive?" documents how the rights to fair use and free expression are being threatened by an intellectual property system that is perilously out of balance.

The report includes six recommendations for change. Documentary filmmaker of "Hoop Dreams," Gordon Quinn, proclaims that the report "is part of a wider movement to educate people about fair use, and it's going to help us users organize and reassert the right to fair use."

In July, a group of Bay Area media organization executive directors and media funders came together for a discussion with Lawrence Wilkinson, a co-founder of Global Business Networks and one of our lead consultants on the Deep Focus scenario planning project. We were there to reconsider and revisit some ideas about the “future of independent media” that have, over the last two years, become mainstream concepts and realities. From “long tail” marketing to moving image media migration online, a number of these trends were forecast by author Andrew Blau in Deep Focus: The Future of Independent Media, published by NAMAC in 2004. Scenarios and questions that seemed abstract and far out on the horizon two years ago are now the concrete challenges that we — in all sectors of the media industries — are facing on a daily basis.

Convened on May 3, 2005 by the Center for Digital Democracy at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center in San Francisco coinciding with INPUT, the caucus was attended by over 70 individuals representing a broad cross-section of the field of independent media. The aim was to begin outlining what public media should be in the United States and how we, the independent media community, can help make it so.

In this white paper, arts consultant and cultural policy analyst Roberto Bedoya offers a reframing of the discourse around American cultural policy. Bedoya argues that there is a significant sector of the non-profit arts community - specifically artist-centered and ethnic-specific arts service organizations - that has been marginalized or absent in cultural policy discussions.