Should Documentary Filmmakers release their raw footage under Creative Commons licenses?

So I've been batting around an idea for a while that I think has some legs.  I'll describe it below.  You let me know what you think about it.  Here goes:

Documentary filmmakers, especially those who tackle political subjects (e.g., Michael Moore, Robert Greenwald) often get accused of bias.  Oh, a critic will say, your film doesn't tell the truth because you edited it together from your own perverse political perspective.  It's biased.  It's diseased. It's infested.  We can't trust it.  Who's to say you didn't edit out all the parts that were bad for your cause?

The filmmakers can come back and contest these accusations, of course, emphasizing how balanced they were and what they did to tell both sides of the story, but in the end, it's just one person's word against another's without any way to test who is right and who is wrong.

So here's my answer: Creative Commons the raw footage and let everyone who wants to look at it decide on their own.  Give them the source material.  Let them compare it to the finished product and see where any bias exists.  One could even let them remix it into their own version of the film.  That way, everyone could tell their version of the story and we could all as an audience compare them for what we believe the truth to be.

The key of using the CC license is that it would allow this to happen without allowing commercial piracy or mere duplication of the film for sale.  All works would have to be substantially different than the original movie and would have to be for non-commercial purposes.  Plus, who's really going to take the raw footage and spend the hundreds of hours re-editing it into the original form when they can just as likely get it off Bittorrent in 1/100th the time? If anything, releasing the raw footage via CC license would revitalize interest in the film as people compared the raw footage to the finished product.  One might even imagine a double-header at a movie theater -- the original vs. the remix.

Of course, the documentary makers would have to be okay with letting go of their film -- the baby.  They would have to trust that free speech and free culture would take care of it and help it thrive.  But it seems to me that if they are truly making films to tell stories, to raise awareness, and to impact people's lives, there could be no more effective way of doing so than to put the camera and editing equiment into the hands of every audience member and give them a stake in the outcome of the debate that the film engenders.

Anyway, that's the idea.  Let me know what you think.  It's kind of radical, but it might just work. Either way, it would be a pretty cool experiment to watch.

Comments

[David Barzelay]

I posted about this, but trackbacks to your blog never work for me, so this comment is in lieu of a ping.

[David Barzelay]

Ah. Movable Type gives an error that says "Trackback failed," rather than "Trackback held for approval" or something. Oops.

[Grant Robertson]

I referred to this in a post on http://indieish.com/

I can't really be cited as an unbiased opinion, as I'm a huge supporter of CC. I do love the idea though, and also added that archive.org is already in a perfect position to be the steward of the archives.

[George Hotelling]

You mentioned Robert Greenwald in your post, he actually released the interviews for Outfoxed under a CC license. I think you're right, more documentary filmmakers should follow his example.