Cleared for stripping

By G.F. | SEATTLE

DAVE KELLETT and Fred Schroeder set out to shoot a documentary about the art of cartooning. In the process, however, the film, called "Stripped", turned into a story about the disruptive and often positive effect of the internet on comic strips. Mr Kellett, meanwhile, turned into something of an expert on America's fair-use doctrine.

To begin with, in 2009 the duo used their own dollars and time to assemble dozens of interviews with traditional newspaper comic-strip artists, like Cathy Guisewite, the eponymous creator of Cathy, as well as the new generation of web-cartoonists, such as Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, the men behind Penny Arcade. Two years in they used a round of crowdfunding to raise the money needed to complete the movie. But in order to show the future, the film-makers wanted to rifle through the past, in the form of copyrighted clips. The cost of using the snippets they had in mind, at about $34,000 (including campaign fees), outstripped cash from that first wave of backers.

So they turned again to Kickstarter, this time spelling out the precise cost of all the footage they wanted to include and setting their goal accordingly. The project, which still has some time until its deadline, has already reached nearly double the target, which lets the film-makers purchase the rights to even more clips.

In their first campaign Messrs Kellett and Schroeder raised $109,000, twice their goal, and more than enough to cover the costs of post production, including editing, music and specialised work required for film projection, digital download and DVD mastering. That project promised delivery to backers in January 2012. The second campaign pushes the deadline back to December this year.

Many crowdfunded projects miss deadlines, often by a lot. Mr Kellett says the original backers, conscious of the complexities involved, have been forgiving. It helps that the extra work made possible by the first round of funding and extra clips in this second will almost certainly make the final product even more watchable. However, the delay also had the unintended consequence of educating Mr Kellett in the niceties of fair-use provisions in America's copyright law. He lays out his take on the matter at his project's Kickstarter site in its questions section.

Mr Kellett lists a number of factors that help decide whether the use of prior art is "fair". They include things like clearing rights globally to allow the film to be distributed in countries with a different copyright regime, or the potential for lawsuits that could take years and piles of money to resolve. Moreover, he points out, should he and Mr Schroeder have risked asserting fair-use rights over some material, movie distributors might well decline to carry it; no insurer would provide the typical and necessary "errors and omission" coverage that theatres require.

And approaching cartoonists or their estates directly allowed them to obtain the high-quality versions, including original film prints; relying on fair use would limit their choice to whatever is floating around in archives or online. Mr Kellett praises the generosity of the likes of Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, and Jeannie Schulz, the widow of Peanuts artist Charles Schulz, for example, who offered free access to pretty much all material to which they held copyright.

In all, the film-makers were granted millions of dollars worth of material at no charge. Where someone else holds the rights, Mr Kellett and Mr Schroeder had to pay: snippets from Schulz's "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown" and "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown" cost $8,000; a clip from "How To Murder Your Wife", owned by MGM, runs to $16,500. But they have no problem with that. Their film is, after all, itself a commercial undertaking.