Pretty big news out of New York today. Eugene Hernandez reports for indieWIRE, “In a time of persistent change for nonprofit organizations that seek to support independent filmmakers, two New York City based entities are merging, with the hopes of creating a more viable oufit for the field. Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal’s Tribeca Film Institute (a sibling of their for-profit Tribeca Film Festival) will join forces with Renew Media, the organization that has funneled millions of dollars in funding to indie filmmakers and artists over nearly twenty years. The news comes as arts funding for organizations and individual filmmakers seems to be in an increasing state of flux and as the changes have even sent some groups into extinction.” Read the article>>

From the Filmmaker magazine e-newsletter, “IFP has announced a number of sales and financing deals which took place at – or immediately following – this year’s IFP Market. Bari Pearlman sold US distribution rights for her documentary feature Daughters of Wisdom to Seventh Art Releasing. Danae Elon pre-sold her documentary The Evil Tongue to Finnish public television. Canadian public broadcaster CBC Newsworld announced that it made pre-sale offers, and is currently in discussions with, three of this year’s documentary works-in-progress, including Goold’s Gold by Tucker Capps and Ryan Sevy, Cornered by Eric Drath, and If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman. Finally, San Francisco-based Chicken & Egg Pictures has also awarded completion grants of $10,000 each to three female documentary filmmakers. The awarded projects included Dee Rees’s Eventual Salvation, Luisa Dantas’s Land of Opportunity: The New New Orleans, and Yolanda Pividal’s Tijuana Nada Más.” I thought you might like to hear some of the results since I was pitching the Market pretty hard.

One of my longtime friends for my days at the Center for Social Media, Simon Kilmurry who works with P.O.V. and has been a long-time advocate of the fair use project, reminded me that I should post about the news that National Union, a member company of AIG, will now be accepting fair use claims that are made based on the Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use and accompanied by a letter from a lawyer. I did post about this over at Renew Media but as I had promised here that I would keep cross-posting to a minimum, I didn’t. But Simon is correct that this is very important and if you aren’t reading Re:Sources, I should provide the scoop here. So, apologies for any lapse in reporting!

The Trades covered the story as well, so it must be true. Also, Larry Lessig announced it on his blog which also makes it true for a lot of folks. If you are a filmmaker and were waiting for the powers that be to annoint your user rights, there you have it.

A small PS – Lessig announced legal clinic assistance to filmmakers for their fair use claims, but also, Peter Jaszi’s clinic at the Washington College of Law as well as Jennifer Urban at USC, among others, have been doing this since the Statement was released. I also have a list of lawyers who understand utilizing fair use and have done so for other filmmakers, so there is help out there! But this kind of assistance doesn’t mean you don’t have to be smart about communication law yourself, so get Michael Donaldon’s book, Clearance & Copyright