POW! ZAP! IT'S ... LAW GUY?

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Faster than a speeding lawsuit, more powerful than a trademark logo, it's ...

Fair Use Man! Mild-mannered law professor by day, crusading cartoonist by night (and more than a few weekends).

Actually, it's the University of Oregon's Keith Aoki, whose most recent project finally gave a comics-crazy kid from Michigan and later underground cartoonist in New York City the chance to do what he's always wanted: draw a comic book.

Not a thriller with tight-costumed superheroes or a graphic novel full of dark malevolence, but a comic nonetheless. Called "Bound by Law?" and written with two colleagues at Duke University, the book uses Aoki's well-crafted pen-and-ink drawings as an engaging way to explain to nonlawyers the basics of copyright and fair use, making it a user-friendly introduction to a contentious area of law.

And it's a project that brought Aoki full circle.

"Comics are my first love," he said recently, sitting among comics and cartoons he's drawn over the years. `I fell in love with Marvel comics when I was 7 or 8 years old. I went to the drugstore and found `Spiderman' and `Fantastic Four,' and I was hooked forever."

He went on to earn two art degrees and remained an admirer of comic artists from Jack Kirby, who drew "Captain America" and "The Fantastic Four," among many other classics, to the counterculture icon R. Crumb, who Aoki considers "one of the greatest artists of the second half of the 20th century." Aoki eventually moved to New York City, where he drew cartoons for the underground paper East Village Eye.

But after years of living the starving artist lifestyle - "I got sick of making about $3,000 a year" - he decided it was time for a real career. He made it into Harvard Law, but wasn't sure what to do there until he found something that resonated with his artistic side.

"I was like a fish out of water until I took a class on copyright law," he said.

Now 50, Aoki has taught copyrights, intellectual property and related areas of law for a dozen years. He's been at the UO School of Law since 1993 and is working on a book about intellectual property and plant genetics, but he never lost his love of comics.

"Bound by Law?" tells the story of Akiko, a modern everywoman artist who just wants to make a low-budget documentary showing a day in the life of New York City. But instead of villains, Akiko faces a bewildering maze of copyright laws that could derail her project by forcing her to pay big bucks for the right to show bits of everyday culture, like a street musician playing the song "Pretty Woman" or people in a bar watching a baseball game on television.

Along the way, Aoki and his colleagues - James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain - also tackle the legal notion of fair use. That's the doctrine that allows artists to reuse bits of other works - fragments of a song, snippets of video - to create something new or to parody what came before.

"We could have written a dry, boring legal article," Aoki said. "But we wanted to try to do something in a form that would reach other types of people."

In this comic, those other people are documentary filmmakers, who face an increasingly daunting "permissions culture" that limits fair use and at times fences off important pieces of 20th century culture and even history. The aggressive assertion of copyrights has made the process of "clearing rights" an expensive obstacle for many artists, Akiko finds.

Some examples: A cell phone rings during the filming of a documentary about New York City kids in a ballroom dance competition. The ring tone used the theme song from the movie "Rocky." For the right to use the few seconds of sound, the record company told the filmmakers they would have to pay $10,000.

In another documentary, about the stage hands at a major opera company, a scene showed two men playing checkers backstage. A small TV nearby was showing an episode of "The Simpsons." Fox wanted $10,000 for the right to use the 4 1/2 -second clip. Instead, the scene was removed.

History also can be affected. The well-regarded civil rights documentary "Eyes on the Prize" is now out of circulation because the filmmakers can't afford to pay to renew rights, and the estate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has aggressively asserted rights to King's image and speeches.

Fair use should cover many such situations, but corporate rights holders who threaten legal action for the most incidental uses make it tough for low-budget artists to stand up for their rights. The comic book deliberately falls short of offering legal advice, but Aoki said the message on fair use is simple: "Use it or lose it."

It took the trio about a year and a half to write "Bound by Law?," an effort that was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The idea came up at a legal conference on the effects of intellectual property rights on culture, and it seemed like a perfect fit for Aoki, who is perhaps one of the few people to use his own cartoons to illustrate articles in the Harvard law journal.

"It was very much like shooting a movie on the cheap," he said of the project. "All we had was time, ink and paper."

Still a child of the '60s, Aoki not only retains his love of comics but also that generation's music - he plays bass in a garage band known as The Garden Weasels, described as being "pretty good considering it is made up entirely of law professors." He keeps his cartooning skills sharp by drawing posters for the band's gigs, and he and his partners plan two more books in the "Bound by Law?" series, one focused on musicians and the other on the re-mix/mash-up culture.

And, of course, they will be comic books.

"You can take the boy out of the comics, but you can't take the comics out of the boy," Aoki said.

BOUND BY LAW?

On the Internet: www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics

CAPTION(S):

University of Oregon law professor Keith Aoki holds posters that he drew to advertise his other love, his band The Garden Weasels.