Law Review and Journal Articles Relating to Dark Content
Patrick Murck, Comment, Waste Content : Rebalancing Copyright Law to Enable Markets of Abundance, 16 ALB. L.J. SCI. & TECH. 383 (2006).
Jacqueline M. Allshouse-Hutchens, How to Give an Old Song a New License:
A Recently Adopted Alternative to Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization v. UMG Recordings, 94 KY. L.J. 561 (2006).
Books
LAWRENCE LESSIG, FREE CULTURE: HOW BIG MEDIA USES TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW TO LOCK DOWN CULTURE AND CONTROL CREATIVITY, xxx (2004), available at http://libreria.sourceforge.net/library/Free_Culture/CHAPTER14.html.
News Clippings Relating to Dark Content
Example: The civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize can no longer be aired or sold because much of its archival footage is copyrighted.
Source: Mother Jones, http://motherjones.com/news/exhibit/2006/03/intellectual_property.html
Can you explain what you mean by ‘dark content’? Initially I thought you were thinking along the lines of ‘dark net’, but the eyes on the prize example throws me as it’s a matter of clearances and the inflating prices of archival material…
Certainly. Dark content is a term used to describe a class of works that is no longer available to the public in any way, commercially or otherwise, because the work contains other copyrighted work(s) which were never licensed and for which a license is not obtainable or is commercially nonviable. This contains not only those works for which the price of clearance is prohibitive, but also things such as a hollywood film shot in the street that happened to catch a portion of a song or something on a television in the background. For new movies, the scene can be reshot, or sometimes edited around (such as in the movie Seven). But for older movies, sometimes this is impossible or would involve overly costly digital editing. The same it true of any work that incorporates other works, a compilation of essays, a song containing a James Brown samples, a photograh with the wrong building in the background. Admittedly, this is a small issue, but I am attempting to project the issue of dark content 25-50 years into the future and determine what the landscape will look like. Given the structuring of many licensing deals in the 70’s, it actually looks a little rough, but managable. But, add in the growing number of orphan works and a lack of a method to obtain any legal clearance for them, and the situation becomes quite bleak.