Copyright protection is largely a transparent issue in film production. It cannot be bypassed in high profile, commercial films; while at the same time it can just as easily be purchased or averted. This is to say that big budget films have the benefit of financial security and, truth be told, solid networking between different artists (i.e. good connections). But then it comes down to the low budget or no budget film, independent or not, copyright protection requires a lot of artistic compromise.



For smaller scale productions, the difference between original and copyrighted content provides for a stark contrast in technical freedom. For example, it may be that the script requests a certain classic song to play during a pitched scene (say, Frank Sinatra). In reality, the script can maintain no status quo, as all elements of production are in constant flux. In this case, that classic Sinatra tune can be attained by purchasing copyright, which can amount to thousands of dollars. If that runs the budget too high, then it must be dropped altogether and replaced with either a cheaper song, or with an original song, specifically written and performed for the script; that would count as original content, with full rights to the artist. This is a blessing for anyone who wants to exhibit their work in a public, distributable arena, as very few legal problems will rear their ugly heads with certified original content. Popular copyright content, however, will cause inevitable confrontations with lawsuits and violations.

Original content requires little hindsight and afterthought. For lack of a better phrase, content created in its original form, with no imitation, is what it is, with no legal attachments. This is why low budget films are better off without licensing fees. Anything else is just excess noise; and artistic merit merits itself even more with original, rather than unoriginal, content.

If that's too high of a challenge (or compromise) to some artists and filmmakers, then there exists the public domain. This is the legal middle ground between copyright and original content. On the one hand content that is public domain was once copyrighted, but now it maintains all the liberties of original content. But that is only one type of public domain. The other is content created specifically to be released openly to the public; essentially ready-made public domain content. Since introduction of Web 2.0 standards, and the popularity of social networking sites, public domain has created a culture all its own. This in turn has generated an increasing amount of ready-made content to be used freely by anyone.

These public domain communities, be it in music or even video, have contributed to the rising demand of content to be used in the endless stream of user-made short films over the last few years. For small scale productions, such a blessing has not been available in the past ten years. And even more revolutionary now is the term 'kopimi,' a wordplay on 'copy me,' which designates content not only as public domain, but proudly public domain.