Fair Use

New Media Rights attorneys and law students recently worked on Adios Amor, a powerful documentary by Jane Greenberg and Laurie Coyle.

In Adios Amor, the discovery of lost photographs sparks the search for a hero that history forgot—Maria Moreno, a migrant mother driven to speak out by her twelve children’s hunger. Years before Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta launched the United Farm Workers, Maria picked up the only weapon she had—her voice—and became an outspoken leader in an era when women were relegated to the background. The first farm worker woman in America to be hired as a union organizer, Maria’s story was silenced and her legacy buried—until now.

Executive Director Art Neill will be speaking at Intersections: Art and Law at the Border on Saturday, April 6 at 10am! He will be discussing intellectual property for artists in the digital age, including copyright, fair use, licensing, and some of the key issues that artists face on a global spectrum. 

New Media Rights responds to over 500 requests for legal services every year, and over two thirds of these involve copyright law.  Copyright law protects the work of these creators, but it also controls how the existing culture around us can be reused and commented upon.  That’s why it’s our mission to make sure that copyright related legal services are available to all regardless of ability to pay. This way we can assist creators who are facing unfair copyright takedowns from people who want to troll or bully them, and we can also work with artists whose rights have been infringed to get justice responsibility and without overreaching in their claims. Read more

San Diego’s Gay Bar History is a documentary by Filmmaker Paul Detwiler that traces the development of the gay bar as a community institution in San Diego. The documentary examines the role gay bars have played in community gathering and organizing during four time periods: before the birth of the modern gay rights movement, during the 1970’s, during the AIDS epidemic (1981-1990’s), all the way through their role in the present day. 

Documentaries often need a variety of legal services, from hiring a crew, to copyright, fair use and licensing, to distribution agreements. New Media Rights works with a variety of documentary and fictional video creators to overcome the legal hurdles to making their productions a reality. Read on to see to see the story of how New Media Rights helped this filmmaker.

Executive Director Art Neill will be speaking at the San Diego Press Club meeting on September 12th at 6pm. The panel is called "Nuts and Bolts: Intellectual Property – Protecting Yours and Using Others," and will include a discussion of using third party content online, protecting your own intellectual property, freelancers’ rights related to unauthorized republishing of their work, and journalists’ and media outlets’ responsibilities regarding work sourced from third parties.

The meeting is being held at the Procopio building in downtown San Diego, and the panel begins at 6pm.

New Media Rights Executive Director Art Neill will be speaking at the Alliance for Community Media National Conference in Baltimore on July 12, 2018! He will be discussing copyright, fair use and licensing with Kevin Goldberg of Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth, P.L.C.