WTFair Use?! An Interactive Fair-Use Workshop
Copyright and trademark challenges are faced by creative rabble rousers in all media. Participants will get schooled on what they really need to know about fair use and emerge with a better understanding of licensing issues to hopefully avoid getting into trouble. Class participation will be encouraged and rewarded with prizes!
Panel
Deena Kalai: a film lawyer and fair use junkie, Deena maintains law practices in Austin, Texas and New York City.
Robert Kleinman: Robert has tried intellectual property cases relating to all forms of major media. In addition to holding a JD he earned an LLM in Intellectual Property from Yeshiva University’s Benjamin Cardozo School of Law.
Jennifer Heitler: she kicked off her career by producing TV shows including Biography on A&E. Jenn went on to manage Twentieth Century Fox’s Script Clearance Department overseeing licensing for movies including Sideways, Alvin & The Chipmunks and The Devil Wears Prada.
Presenters
Deena Kalai represents clients engaged in entertainment and the creative arts, including film, music, television, fashion, publishing, and digital media. She has counseled producers, writers, and directors engaged in both narrative features and documentaries. She is licensed in Texas and New York, and has offices in Austin and Manhattan.
Robert Kleinman an aggressive intellectual property litigator. He has secured registered trademark and intellectual property rights for his clients in more than 50 countries; represented the seller in one of the 10 largest domain-name transactions in the history of the internet; and is one of a handful of attorneys to have secured a 3-dimensional trademark in the United States. He is frequently mistaken for the ferocious African honey badger, also a small and fearless predator.
Michael C. Donaldson is an entertainment attorney who has been fighting for independent filmmakers for over 30 years. In addition to working on films by such industry icons as Oliver Stone, Davis Guggenheim and Lawrence Bender, Michael serves as General Counsel to Film Independent (home of the Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival) and the Writers Guild Foundation. He is the industry’s go-to attorney for fair use (a doctrine in United States copyright law permitting limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the rights holders) and other clearance- and rights-related issues.
Some of Michael’s notable accomplishments include:
o Authoring Clearance and Copyright, which is currently used in over 50 film schools and has become the standard industry reference book.
o Being honored as one of Hollywood Reporter’s 2010 & 2011 Power Lawyers.
o Successfully negotiating with Media Professional Insurance Company and Chubb Insurance Company to offer fair-use riders on the E&O insurance policies, allowing many films to be made under the fair-use doctrine.
o Co-authoring with his partner Lisa Callif the American Bar Association’s Legal Guide to Filmmaking.
o Being honored with the Amicus Award by The International Documentary Association – an honor bestowed on only two others in the 25-year history of the awards: Steven Spielberg and John Hendricks (founder of the Discovery Channel).
o Serving as one of the authors of the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use and being the only attorney in private practice to serve on the drafting committee for the recently released Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video (which includes a section on mash-ups).
o Serving on the Advisory Committee of the Stanford Fair Use Project.
o Being the sole American attorney to assist in the drafting of the Rome Resolution of 2007 to harmonize fair use across the European union.
o Assisting in the drafting and lobbying for Orphan Works legislation.
o Holding the position of President of the International Documentary Association.
o Organizing and leading the Documentary Credits Coalition in negotiations with the cable networks to prevent the wholesale migration of credits from the screen to the Internet.
o Negotiating for Dummies (now in its second edition and translated into eleven languages), Fearless Negotiating (published in hardback in 2007 by McGraw Hill) and The E-Z Legal Guide to Trademarks & Copyrights.
Michael graduated from UC Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall in 1967. He’s worked on such projects as “This Film is Not Yet Rated” (where all 134 clips were utilized under fair use), “Wanderlust” (saving its filmmaker over $400,000) and “Expelled” (which featured the song “Imagine,” prompting an unsuccessful law suit by Yoko Ono). Michael has also worked with the Geffen Playhouse and the REDCAT, as well as representing Center Theatre Group (Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas Theatre) for over twenty years.
Aside from frequently lecturing at law and film schools in the United States and Europe, Michael is an avid skier, world-wide hiker, and an award-winning photographer.
Jennifer Heitler began her career in the television industry producing various shows including The Roseanne Show and Biography.
She then transitioned into film and managed Twentieth Century Fox's Script Clearance Department, overseeing such hits as The Devil Wears Prada, Sideways and Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.
After falling in love with Austin at SXSW 2010, she picked up and moved like every other annoying Cali transplant. She landed on her feet as Director of Marketing for Cosential, an enterprise software company with a CRM solution built specifically for the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry.
She enjoys merging both worlds and is thrilled to be a panelist at SXSW 2012!
Monday, March 12
