Creative + business protection
Our round-up of excellent, accurate, and free legal resources every filmmaker should know about.
THIRD-PARTY RESOURCES
- Review US Copyright Office circulars to learn basics about US Copyright Law, including fair use
- Find millions of Smithsonian digital assets available for free from the Smithsonian Open Access Database
- Understand the different Creative Commons licenses
- Ready to register your film with the Copyright Office? Here’s the link – and don’t forget to watch the handy video tutorial
- Look to the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press for helpful information about the laws that govern filming at protests and rallies, the recording of phone calls and in-person conversations, and pre-publication review.
- Refer to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide to Protecting Your Data During a Protest for tips on protecting your digital devices., including cameras
- If you’re planning on using a song or musical composition in your project and need to secure a sync license, you’ll need to figure out who has the publishing rights to that piece of music – typically the music publisher(s)/songwriter(s)/composer(s)/lyricist(s). You can often find the relevant parties by searching these databases:
- When using a sound recording in a film, filmmakers need to secure both a sync license and a master use license for that sound recording. You can search the rights holders of a song recording using the online database maintained by Soundexchange.
- It’s not uncommon for publishing rights to be split among multiple parties. You can learn more about music licensing, and how songwriters, performers, publishers and record labels all work together, from this handy guide maintained by the US Copyright Office.
- Click here to learn the difference between a New York Corporation, LLC and Sole Proprietorship
- Click here for step-by-step instructions on forming an LLC in New York
- Search this database to learn if your company name is available in NY
* No attorney-client relationship has been created by your access to this website. This website does not provide legal advice and the Filmmakers Legal Clinic is not acting as your attorney.
