aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Fair Use Resources

An “investigative newsletter” with an outrageous clause (since ammended) appended to its copyright notice on each and every page - “This article is copyright protected and Fair Use is not applicable.” [emphasis mine] - occasioned an interesting exchange (see the p.s.) and this important collection of Fair Use resources:

Three of the most comprehensive resources dealing with the topic of Fair Use are the Stanford University Copyright & Fair Use Center, the Fair Use Network (sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School), and Electronic Frontier Foundation with its EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers.  You can find less comprehensive information at the U.S. Copyright Office site.  The Stanford website offers information on all aspects of fair use — from basics to specialized issues, to legislative activity, to caselaw, to lists of relevant website and articles. 

Here are some specific articles and webpages that may fit your needs:

-- The Copyright Management Center, sponsored by Indiana U. and Purdue U. is aimed at educational uses, but offers a Checklist for Fair Use that has general application.

-- The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has an excellent set of Frequently Asked Questions about Copyright and Fair Use, with a nice summary of the four statutory factors.  The FAQ answers the question Do I need permission from the copyright holder to make fair use? like this: “No. If your use is fair, it is not an infringement of copyright — even if it is without the authorization of the copyright holder. Indeed, fair use is especially important to protect uses a copyright holder would not approve, such as criticism or parodies. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 US 569 (1994).” When at Chilling Effects, you might also want to check out Betsy Rosenblatt’s Copyright Basics.

--Kimberlee Weatherall (an academic Australian IP expert) and famed weblogging law professor Eugene Volokh offer 14 Copyright Tips for Bloggers, which looks at the issues from the perspective of both the copyright holder and the prospective Fair User.

-- Mary E. Carter’s eFuse article When Copying Is Okay is also a very useful document.  As for the kind of copyright notice to use on your website, she advises: “Placing your copyright notice on your Web site is a start to protecting your copyrights on-line. Read some of the copyright notices on the Web sites of newspapers and other mainstream content providers for inspiration on how to word your notice. I generally recommend the simpler-is-better approach. Just place the “circle c” ©, or even just (C), and your name and the year of execution on the first page of your site and leave it at that.”

-- — Nolo.com has a basic discussion on the Fair Use rule (annoyingly spread over 4 pages). [Note: In a lengthy monograph, I disagree with its notion that a haiku poem is too small to every be quoted under Fair Use].

Admittedly, it is not always easy to know with certainty whether some assertions of the Fair Use exemption are appropriate.  Nonetheless, the Fair Use Network correctly says that “Despite this unpredictability, it is important to assert fair use, and reject assumptions that all uses must be licensed and paid for.” And, Marjorie Heins put it well in the Online Journal Review (Feb. 23, 2006, via Ambrogi’s Media Law):  “To the extent that fair use is not used, it will shrink, and to the extent that it is used and asserted, it will remain healthy and even grow.” Perhaps, the courts or legislature should explicitly decide, as suggested by Judge Posner at Lessig Blog in Fair Use and Misuse, that excessive claims to copyright protection through the denial of Fair Use rights amount to copyright abuse that forfeits the law’s protections until remedied.

Via Boing Boing.