As reported earlier this month in LibraryJournal.com, a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed a copyright infringement and breach of contract suit filed against The Regents of University of California and UCLA by the Association for Information, Media and Equipment (AIME), a nonprofit trade association of educational video publishers, and New York-based Ambrose Video Publishing (AVP).

As reported in February on www.documentary.org, the plaintiffs charged that UCLA had illegally streamed copyright-protected DVD titles hundreds of times for use by faculty and students both on and off campus on the University's Web-based Intranet, using a technology system called Video Furnace, which enables the recording of content and subsequent delivery as video-on-demand to computers and set-top boxes. UCLA countered these challenges, claiming fair use as well as a public performance exemption for face-to-face teaching and digital distance learning uses.

According to the court filing, UCLA has placed over 2,500 titles on its file server for use by students and faculty. The titles include hundreds of documentary films distributed by such respected companies as The Criterion Collection, California Newsreel, Women Make Movies, among many others.

Judge Consuelo B. Marshall, of the US District Court for the Central District of California, based much of her decision on the fact that AIME did not hold any of the copyrights. She ruled that "to establish a claim for copyright infringement, individual copyrights owners' participation is necessary." Marshall also ruled that given UCLA had the right of public performance of the DVDs, the university was entitled to post the content on its Intranet, which, according to the ruling "does not take the viewing of the DVD out of the educational context," regardless of the source of access. The plaintiffs had argued that streaming is not included in public performance because it can be accessed outside of a classroom.

Under Section 110 of the Copyright Act, the allowable contexts for educational performances of DVD  include face-to-face situations and transmissions.

As Kevin Smith, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, told LibraryJournal.com, "It is possible, at least, for a school to argue for what UCLA was doing based on an amalgam of these two exceptions, or based on fair use (which is a separate and distinct exception). As it turned out, however, UCLA did not need to make either of these arguments because of the license language that permitted public performances. The judge interpreted that language to include a closed performance over a campus network and thus ruled that the license settled that part of the matter."

For more commentary on the ruling, click here and here.

For a copy of the ruling, click here.

The International Documentary Association believes that the power and artistry of film is vital to cultures and societies globally, and we fiercely defend the rights of filmmakers and artists everywhere to practice their art and to seek and reveal truth in their work, however provocative that truth may be.

We strenuously uphold the principles of free speech and freedom from censorship. The expression of truth should never be silenced by the exercise of power by a State or system of authority that may feel threatened by the content of the artistic or journalistic work–both essential elements of democracy.

Together with our entire international community of documentary filmmakers, The International Documentary Association calls for the release and fair treatment of Iranian filmmakers, artists, and actors. These artists, and other filmmakers, actors and journalists like them, must be immediately released and allowed to continue their artistic and journalistic work without restriction or penalty. We stand united with them, as do artists across the globe. And we will continue to fight for their fundamental human right of self-expression.

Doc U is the International Documentary Association's series of educational seminars and workshops for aspiring and experienced documentary filmmakers. Taught by artists and industry experts, participants receive vital training and insight on various topics including: fundraising, distribution, licensing, marketing, and business tactics.

Built two years ago to provide the Toronto International Film Festival organization with a perennial headquarters, and the Canadian city with a muscular independent showcase, the TIFF Bell Lightbox is redolent of the isolating quirks of festival-going. Office-like and rectangularly prismatic, with three stories of theaters, the building's amenities are strangely conducive to hyper-personalized experience. The escalators are narrow; the slim, cushioned leisure benches placed on each floor barely accommodate two adults. The walls and windows form an overwhelming, almost smarting whiteness to greet those emerging from darkened screenings, as though intending to discourage conversation and instead cauterize one's post-cinematic perceptual rawness. A row of elevators is tucked inconspicuously, almost begrudgingly, behind the main staircase, and the bathrooms are at times frustratingly digital in their attempt to provide maximum convenience. (A urinal flushed three times during one visit, but I had to wave my hand for nearly 20 seconds before a paper towel dispenser to get it to work).

This unbearably tasteful modernity was an appropriate enough prison in which to be stuck for a solid week in September, when the Lightbox housed the majority of the year's TIFF press and industry screenings away from the public bustle of the galas, director appearances and panels. The child-like geometry of the architecture, the pervasive blankness, and even the Jacques Tati gag-ready toilets and sinks are like a pure canvas upon which one can splatter a response to any given showing, then stand back afterward to see what sticks. After the first screening I attended at the festival, of Corinna Belz's Gerhard Richter Painting, I ran to the men's room to wash my hands. After placing my palm underneath a crooked, black spigot, an apropos squiggle of opalescent gray appeared across my fingers, accompanied by a perky whirring. I watched the squiggle smear into an abstract blob before pressing it into my other hand and rubbing, as though praying for the automated faucet's activation.

That soapy excretion might have been more viscerally piquant than anything Richter produces in Belz's film--though we watch him exact his obsessive methods with meticulous detail. Short on archival interludes and biographical anecdotes but brimming with real-time studio footage, the documentary is one of the most brutally honest renderings of the practice of visual artistry. Richter's previous moments of inspiration, some of which are briefly described for neophytes, seem all the more precious because Belz can't seem to capture him in one. Her blocking, however, remains uncannily tactful throughout: In one session, we watch Richter scrape a myriad of prime colors into a gruel-like substance with a squeegee, and the camera is careful to keep his tense hands or brooding face in the frame until the piece has reached some sort of completion.

Richter's foundering appears in some respects the product of stringent stylistic adherence--once an upstart who collapsed representative distinctions between photography and painting, he now churns out abstract series that treat color as texture and vice versa. This calcification of personal aesthetic is what similarly makes Neil Young Journeys, Jonathan Demme's third concert documentary with the aging folk-rock musician (and incidentally one of the two Demme films that played TIFF this year), so subdued. Shot during a contemplative solo performance at Toronto's Massey Hall before a hushed audience, the movie is more or less a live rendering of Young's recent album, Le Noise, with the addition of a few benignly belted-out hits. Demme spackles the set list with footage of Young driving from his hometown in suburban Ontario to the venue and narrating the trip with generic reminiscences; the elliptical format seems as sturdy and complacent as Young's rustic-sounding, modal guitar tunings.

Accessibility of public personality, or the lack thereof, haunted another doc that played TIFF: Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, which starts out as a quest for the "reality" behind the titular politician and swiftly devolves into a portrait of the frustrations of journalistic impregnability. Director Nick Broomfield travels to Wasilla, Alaska, and interviews Palin's parents, her former pastor, and a circus of former career confidants before getting anticlimactically booted from a rally for asking the wrong questions. Broomfield doesn't dig much up that we don't already know--and occasionally treats yesterday's memes like they're exposé gold--but his decidedly non-American self-deprecation provides Palin's troubled celebrity with cultural depth. That Broomfield humiliates himself for the sake of understanding a trigger happy, right-wing governor-turned-failed vice presidential candidate from the non-contiguous US is an intimidating indicator of the loopiness of our global political climate.

In these three films, Nick Broomfield--who once turned to Heidi Fleiss with similarly humble scrutiny, and who can be considered the subject proper of Sarah Palin: You Betcha!--Neil Young and Gerhardt Richter are all in a sense interacting with former versions of themselves. The TIFF roster possessed such a glut of documentaries by both mainstays and newcomers that it's virtually impossible to tease out any intentional thematic strands from the programming; still, many of the choices I made in my screening schedule depicted the confrontation of essentially unassailable pasts. This even included dialogue with national history: The Argentinean film Fatherland, directed by Nicolás Prividera, has a cast of anonymous unknowns in street clothes wandering about Buenos Aires' famed La Recoleta mausoleum, reading passionate quotes by their forefathers. The movie's text-heaviness and "lest we forget" sobriety aren't interacting with the country's incunabula so much as presenting it, but the utterly undramatic recitations by men, women and children of all ages likeably flatten the distance between revolutionary and civilian.

Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss, too, engages with the past, providing a patiently apolitical look at two twentysomethings who were incarcerated for murder in their late teens. Herzog clearly sympathizes with the young man who's been sentenced to capital punishment (the other received life imprisonment), but he can't or won't refute the evidence incriminating him, either, and eventually his languid conversations with the death row resident take on a futile rhythm. Breaking from the structural playfulness that defined his early nonfiction work, Herzog's receptiveness and fidelity to his subjects' narratives closely resembles his approach in the remarkable Little Dieter Needs to Fly, another film that found beauty in idiosyncratic courage. We're shocked by the rawness of the testimony from the other inmate's repentant father, serving a life sentence himself, and in the newly-wedded wife of the same perpetrator, happily pregnant by artificial means. That this last, touching talking head is immediately followed by footage of an empty execution room neatly encapsulates Herzog's cynical humanism--the rainbows we're offered in life very often lead directly to the grave.

By contrast, in Crazy Horse, I could feel Fredrick Wiseman almost coquettishly challenging his own philosophy. Cataloging professional prurience with his typical unobtrusiveness--"Spanish fly-on-the-wall"-style doc, can we call it?--Wiseman takes us back- and on-stage at the famed Parisian cabaret of the title, where choreographer Philippe Decouflé is reinventing the peep show. Rehearsals of full musical numbers take up much of the two-hour-plus running time; we see skinny, interchangeable blondes parading nakedly, their bodies severed and superimposed upon by vertiginous lighting effects. The film's journalistic detachment from this material eventually becomes a kind of joke that invites us to enjoy the club as a sensory rather than erotic or social experience. Wiseman has always maintained that his camera doesn't alter what it captures, but this assertion has become even more complex in the director's last three performance-study films. At TIFF, Crazy Horse felt like something of a recondite culmination, of both Wiseman's recent career path and the festival's tendency to cater to the individual filmgoer. Talented strippers seem to be dancing only for you, just as the luxury of automated sinks convince you that your hands are a privilege from which to rinse waste.

Joseph Jon Lanthier is a California ex-pat who writes about art and media.

The CIA's Predator drone missile strike that killed the American-born al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen last month set off a heated discussion in policy circles about whether it was legal to attack a US citizen. A spate of editorials and articles demanding the release of the secret presidential finding justifying the use of lethal force has gained some traction among pundits, the ACLU and others, but has been met with a big yawn from the public. (The October 9th edition of The New York Times reported on the contents of the legal memorandum, by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, that justified the decision.) Contrast this to revelations about waterboarding and secret renditions and we might conclude that there's been a shift in opinion about the use of secret warriors doing the bidding of the president.

Clearly, the public's attitude has come a long way since the Church Committee Senate hearings on intelligence in the mid '70s shocked the country with revelations of CIA-sponsored assassination attempts on Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, the destabilization of Chile, the opening of mail and other misdeeds, all sponsored by the CIA. A new documentary by Carl Colby, The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby masterfully takes us into the dark corners of this world. It chronicles the life of the filmmaker's father, CIA Director William Colby, whose testimony to the Senate panel prompted numerous reforms in the agency. The film takes us back to that era and gives us a much-needed framework with which to think about the legal limits of power and the moral choices we make. 

The Man Nobody Knew also examines another long-running war, Vietnam, for which Colby developed the counter-insurgency strategy, as we try to assess the effectiveness of similar policies in the ten-year-old war in Afghanistan. In another instance of American life coming full circle, the current policy was crafted by the new head of the CIA, David Petraeus, before he exchanged his general's combat fatigues for a suit and tie at the agency.

The Church Committee hearings were sparked by a series of New York Times articles by Seymour Hersh, who reveals in the documentary that William Colby was one of his main sources. While Colby's predecessor, Richard Helms, was known as "The Man Who Kept the Secrets," Colby became seen as the man who spilled the beans, especially the dirty secrets, dubbed "The Family Jewels"--a remarkable denouement to a career that evolved from World War II hero who parachuted behind enemy lines, to Cold Warrior who rigged elections in Italy to defeat the Communists, to chief engineer of the counter-insurgency strategy in Vietnam. Colby was the model of the good gray man of the center who did what was asked of him, even if he didn't believe it would work--but who finally broke ranks.

 "It had to do with his Jesuit upbringing," explains Carl Colby. "It's about questioning the moral imperatives." The Papal shock troops, organized by the Jesuits, known colloquially as "The Company," were a tool to be used wherever needed to thwart the Reformation, but also to reform the Church. The CIA, also known as "The Company," was a tool to be used by the president to thwart the Communists. These tools have a way of getting away from their masters, however, and taking on a life of their own. In the case of Colby, the film makes it clear that he reached a point where his sense of morality overcame his sense of duty.

His world view was forged during his service in World War II. Former New York Times reporter David Halberstam once explained to me there was a clear divide between the World War II and Vietnam War generations. "We were torn, in contrast to the correspondents of World War II and Korea, where there was a great legitimacy of purpose and policy," he said in an interview about reporting in Vietnam. "We became caught between traditional definitions of loyalty, patriotism and saluting the flag, and a higher definition, it seemed to me in our minds, of democracy--the need to tell the truth on something that was a lie."

As CIA station chief in Saigon, Colby didn't appreciate Halberstam and the other young reporters. As Carl Colby reflects, "He'd say, ‘These people aren't seeking the truth; they are seeking ways to bolster their arguments.'"

But the seeds of doubt had also been planted in the CIA director's mind. Standing on a mountaintop overlooking a fog-shrouded valley in Laos, and talking to one of his case officers, Vint Lawrence, who'd organized the Hmong tribes there, he was asked "if this is going to work out," says Carl. "My father replied, ‘Maybe not.'"

How Colby pere moves from this realization to upend the practices of the CIA is a remarkable story that takes us into the shadowy world of foreign policy and into the personal journey of one man who not only witnessed history but made it and paid the price for the choices he made.

As we search for a way to wind down our current wars and contemplate the increased use of Predators to do our dirty work, we should take a look at the questions raised by this important film and have a public discussion about how we want our country's moral compass to be set.

The Man Nobody Knew , a First Run Features release, opens in Los Angeles on October 14 at the Landmark Nuart.

Michael Rose is a Los Angeles-based writer, producer and director.