We are delighted to publish this special issue, 15.2.

This Copyright Law and Filmmaking special issue is a collaborative effort between copyright law expert Bartolomeo Meletti, guest editor, and practice researcher Estrella Sendra, associate editor of Screenworks. Recognising a growing demand for guidance on copyright law in the creative reuse of audiovisual material for research purposes, the co-editors first developed an Introductory Guide to Video Essays, published open access by Learning on Screen in 2020. This guide included a section on copyright considerations, which has since been widely disseminated through various courses, workshops and presentations.  

The most recent initiative co-led by Meletti and Sendra was a free five-session course entitled Filmmaking and Copyright Law, delivered by Learning on Screen between December 2023 to January 2024. Funded by the UK Intellectual Property Office as part of the Audiovisual Voices project, the course was primarily aimed at postgraduate researchers interested in disseminating their academic work through video essays and other research-based videos.  

As part of the final assessment, the course featured an online film festival where participants showcased their completed productions, accompanied by a 200-500-word research statement. One of the guiding questions for this statement was: ‘What are the relevant copyright aspects of your project?’ The screening was followed by a peer feedback discussion chaired by tutors, with questions designed to support constructive critique. The discussion concluded with feedback from both tutors, where Sendra focused on video production and Meletti on the creative reuse of material from a copyright law perspective. This process emulated peer review and was followed by one-to-one feedback sessions, allowing participants time to reflect on and apply suggestions during the festival.  

The project responded to a long-standing need for greater awareness and understanding of copyright law in the context of practice research. Our Guidelines for Submission illustrate this need well, since the only reference to copyright at the moment is the line “Contributors take full responsibility for ensuring that their submissions adhere to UK copyright guidelines”, which links to government guidance.  

Practice researchers encounter this kind of approach throughout the filmmaking and research lifecycle. When seeking advice on copyright – whether from our institutions, funders, film festivals, distributors, or publishers – we often face risk-averse policies that require us to clear all rights in third party materials and assume full responsibility for any potential infringement.  

Educational institutions, independent publishers and film festivals are not to blame. Over time, copyright law has become so complex and the threat of sanction for infringement so explicit, that risk aversion is often the only viable option. At the same time, for practice researchers, clearing rights is rarely feasible, nor is gaining confidence in copyright law through independent learning only. The Audiovisual Voices project addressed this issue by inviting participants to think critically, but also constructively, about copyright law. It encouraged them to explore copyright exceptions – cases where protected materials can be used without permission from the rights holders – through their own creative practice.  

The results of the Filmmaking and Copyright Law course were so impressive and the topic so timely that we decided to launch a call for a special issue to be published on Screenworks. As a publication nurturing practice researchers, Screenworks felt compelled to host this special issue, sharing diverse video-making copyright-informed approaches, as examples of good practice, as we move forward in the field of practice research. In the age of AI, the legal and policy landscape surrounding research and creativity has reached a new level of complexity (Kretschmer, Meletti et al., 2025). We hope this special issue and its inspiring contributions will help the community of practice researchers make sense of this complexity.  

All participants were invited to submit their work, with applied changes in the video and a 2,000-word supporting statement structured in alignment with the editorial guidelines of Screenworks, thus enhancing the research value and knowledge contribution of their productions. Practitioners were encouraged to expand their response to the copyright question, including it in the methodology section of their research statements. Because of the emphasis on the application of copyright law (exceptions), we identified a series of peer reviewers with expertise on the field, either because of their practice research or their knowledge on copyright law. Peer reviewers agreed to be identified in the editorial of the special issue, as a form of effort in identifying and building a community of practice researchers with increasing awareness and understanding of copyright law. These included filmmaker and historian Dr Lily Ford, with significant work on archives; Dr Richard Langley, a leading creative academic mentoring creative practitioners, often acknowledged in submissions of audiovisual essays; film academic Dr Claudy Op den Kamp, teaching and researching the role of copyright in found footage filmmaking practices; documentary filmmaker and educator Dr Shane O’Sullivan, specialised in the creative reuse of the archive and principal investigator of the AHRC-funded Make Film History project; and Professor Jane Secker, a leading expert on copyright literacy and the impact of new technologies in Higher Education.  

The work included in the issue emphasise the decolonising potential of video essays and practice research, more broadly (Sendra, 2020). Practitioners become storytellers of untold or mistold stories, that is, of the “anarchive” (Brozgal, 2020), referenced explicitly in the work of Mariam Al-Hussona, Mapping (An)archive of Iraqi Dance at the Margins. The productions contest the ways in which communities, practices and places are intentionally made absent and excluded from society and history through various forms of the “colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 17).  

In the case of Al-Hussona, the focus is a situated study of Iraqi dance, particularly what is often referred to as 'Kawliya'  or Ghajar dance, where women twirl their hair as they dance. Al-Hussona is making an effort to archive the archive within a context of rupture and absence. Engagement with personal archives is especially significant in this issue, as seen in The Force, by Wilma Stone, and The Nita Harvey Archive, by Ellen Nolan.  

Stone poetically contests and resists a history of actively erasing Indigenous and local knowledge systems, cultural heritage and collective identity, particularly of Scottish Gypsy Traveller communities. Her art film is informed by lived family experience, moving through personal, political social and geographic domains via affect. “I’m afraid part of that was erased”, a sonic archive claims. Fragmentation becomes a form of intersectional unification, adding complexity to both production and representation.  

Ellen Nolan offers a unique and deeply personal engagement with the inherited archive of her great aunt, Nita Harvey, an actress who worked for Paramount during the 1930s Hollywood studio era. In doing so, Nolan questions the very existence of archives, suggesting that the “archive is only animated and alive when I am working with it”, embodying it. This sheds light on a hidden history of women in 1930s Hollywood. 

The authority of archives, or rather, their lack thereof, is also questioned in the final work, The Lost Empires, by Richard Denny. The author argues that archival maps and imperial histories should not be trusted, as they are biased and shaped by the historically unequal power dynamics, ultimately raising questions about identity and memory.  

Dr Marina Daou’s video essay, Leonid Gaidai: The King of Soviet Comedy, adds value to a prolific filmmaker who remains underrecognised internationally. Her work contributes to existing film scholarship on the comedic genre, and more specifically, Soviet comedy, approached intersectionally through a focus on gender and censorship.  

Finally, Joel Blackledge presents a compelling video essay situated within the archaeology of media, comparing memes with the early cinema of attractions. He specifically focuses on the POV as a category of meme illustrating how film and internet trends, often dismissed, should be taken seriously. The video essay reminds us of the camera’s function as an eye.  

The aesthetic approaches vary significantly across the six productions. At times, they adopt expository tones, narrated through voice-over, as in the works of Blackledge and Daou. In Denny’s piece, the narration is manipulated, while Stone’s work is marked by a distinctly poetic style. Al-Hussona, by contrast, relies on archival interviews, carefully curated and edited to support her argument.  

Affective aesthetics prevail throughout, with creative compilations of diverse audiovisual materials, found footage, original recordings, photographs, artifacts, and other archival documents, interwoven with multiple layers of sound, in The Force, a title that reflects the strength of the art film. Nolan reaches such an embodied dimension that we see her performing as her great aunt in a series of photographs that recreate lived experiences by her great aunt. Her quest of identity unfolds through the exploration of her great aunt’s life in Hollywood, time travelling into the past, with a clear influence from her background as a fashion photographer.  

The published work also illustrates the possibilities of considering, reflecting on and engaging with copyright law within practice research. Copyright exceptions permit the use of protected works when such use is deemed socially, culturally, politically or economically beneficial. The UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) provides an extensive list of exceptions. For example, the exceptions for criticism and review (s.30 CDPA) and for caricature, parody or pastiche (s.30A) are underpinned by freedom of expression. Others are intended to facilitate teaching (s.32) and research (s.29) or to enable memory institutions to preserve shared cultural heritage (s.42).  

The authors of this special issue have relied on a variety of exceptions, advancing copyright scholarship in multiple ways through practice research. Their contributions positively shape the public domain, both in theory and in practice. Among the many conceptualisations of the public domain, scholars have proposed ‘behavioural’ definitions that encompass all activities not requiring permission from the copyright owner, including uses permitted under copyright exceptions (Erickson, Kretschmer et al., 2015).  

Under this broader definition, the contributions demonstrate how the public domain can look different to each creator, depending on several factors, such as the type of work being used, as well as the purpose and context of its use. On a more practical level, through the combination of their film and research statements, the authors show and describe informed decisions on copyright issues. This can positively impact both their personal practice and the wider community of practice researchers. For example, if a video were threatened with removal on copyright grounds, the creators would have a robust argument for issuing a counter notice. In turn, other researchers and filmmakers may be inspired to engage more confidently and constructively with complex legal issues.  

The Force is a fascinating example of a pastiche artwork. Under the same exception that allowed the Tate to screen Christian Marclay’s The Clock between 2018 and 2019, Stone lawfully appropriates and creatively repurposes extracts of diverse existing materials, including “rephotographed book pages, found footage film clips, amateur home movies, travelogue footage, poetry excerpts, and sound archive snippets.” At the same time, her creative techniques and scholarly work challenge institutional practices as well as traditional notions of authorship that underpin copyright law. 

The pastiche exception is also used by Al-Hussona in Mapping (An)Archive of Iraqi Dance at the Margins and by Blackledge in POV: You're cinema and you're dead. 

Al-Hussona's relies on both the quotation and pastiche exceptions to use “fragments from several audio-visual sources on YouTube as a mode to creatively play with the material, as well as a method of quotation to explore my research questions.” Provocatively, she argues that by reusing works that may disappear from YouTube at any time, she is preserving fragile cultural memory and may therefore also benefit from the exception for preservation purposes. 

Blackledge relies on the pastiche exception only at the end of his film, while most of his work engages with videographic criticism by showing “how images function next to other images.” By commenting on these images not only with voice-over but also through juxtaposition with other images, he demonstrates innovative ways of using an exception commonly applied in the TV and film industry – namely, that for criticism and review. He also notes the challenge of providing “sufficient acknowledgement” when using memes. 

Daou’s Leonid Gaidai: The King of Soviet Comedy also relies on fair dealing for criticism and review in her explanatory video essay about the renowned Soviet filmmaker. Her use of voice-over offers a conventional example of how to apply this exception, similar to Mark Cousins’ commentary on film clips in The Story of Film. In promoting “knowledge about Russo-Soviet cinema in English-speaking videographic criticism”, Daou argues that the exception for research and private study may also cover some of her uses of third-party materials.  

In The Lost Empires, Denny makes “a significant effort to respect the original context of reused footage and materials,” including meticulous acknowledgement of all sources. He reuses his own artwork (The Tent) as well as third-party works under open non-commercial licences (music) and a wide range of copyright exceptions, such as pastiche and parody, quotation, criticism and review, and incidental inclusion. He also creatively argues for the use of text-to-speech software under the exception for illustration for instruction. 

In the research statement accompanying The Nita Harvey Archive, Nolan does not mention use of third-party materials under copyright exceptions. Instead, by asserting “Harvey’s authorship” of the archive, she claims that these materials are not “third-party” in the first place. Nolan’s intimate and innovative dialogue with her great aunt’s archive questions and challenges not only 1930s Hollywood history but also certain provisions of copyright law itself. 

We thank all authors for their excellent work and thought-provoking contributions to the field. We hope that our Screenworks audiences enjoy engaging with their work as much as we did as co-editors of this issue. With gratitude and recognition,   

Dr Estrella Sendra (King’s College London, associate editor Screenworks) and Bartolomeo Meletti (CREATe, University of Glasgow, guest editor) 

on behalf of the Screenworks editorial team.  

This volume of Screenworks is a special issue/dossier, but we also publish a rolling volume every year. Each rolling volume runs from September to July, with the editorial team taking a well-deserved break in August. To submit work please read our Submissions Guidelines and use our Online Submission Form. If you are interested in submitting your practice and want further advice, then please contact us on admin@screenworks.org.uk with “Submissions” in the subject line.

References:  

Brozgal, L. (2020) Absent the Archive. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.  

Copyright guidance on UK copyright law can be found on the Copyright User website: https://www.copyrightuser.org/  

Erickson, K, Kretschmer, M, Heald, P., Mendis, D., and Homberg, F. (2015) Copyright and the Value of the Public Domain. Intellectual Property Office, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain  

Kretschmer, M., Meletti, B., Bently, L., Cifrodelli, G., Eben, M., Erickson, E., Iramina, A., Li, Z., Mcdonagh, L., Perot, E., Porangaba, L., Thomas, A. (2025) ‘Copyright and AI in the UK: Opting-In or Opting-Out?’, GRUR International, https://doi.org/10.1093/grurint/ikaf093   

Meletti, B. and van Gompel, S. (2022). Code of Best Practices on Creative Reuse for Documentary Filmmakers, https://zenodo.org/records/7180853 

Meletti, B., Morrison, C, & Secker, J. (2023). Code of Fair Practice for the Use of Audiovisual Works in Film Education. Learning on Screen, https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Code-of-Fair-Practice_Printable.pdf 

Mignolo, W. D. and Walsh, C. (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press.  

Sendra, E. (2020). ‘Video Essays: Curating and Transforming Film Education through Artistic Research’. In International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Special Issue: Mapping Artistic Research in Film, 5(2): 65-81 https://doi.org/10.24140/ijfma.v5.n2.04 

Credit for the Special Issue front cover image: 

Film still from The Force © Stone 2024.