Duke Law School, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, has posted the eight finalists to their Arts Project Moving Image Contest. The contest asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film. The judges (including our own Glenn) are selecting three winners from among these finalists, and the winners will be announced on January 15, 2005. They are also asking for your vote, from which they will give People’s Choice awards.

All of the finalists are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, and the videos range from the account of a documentarian trying to cover army recruiters in the North Carolina Piedmont, to a Polish animator’s science fiction vision of music’s apocalytic future, from a college student’s efforts to make a Public Service Announcement about the Civil Rights movement, to a dissection of the law behind “Supersize Me.”