Fair Use Best Practices, Guidelines, & Policies
Fair Use
One of the rights accorded to the owner of copyright is the right to reproduce or to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords...One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of “fair use.” The doctrine of fair use has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years and has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law - http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107.
Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:
- The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
- The nature of the copyrighted work
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
- The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work
Read more at http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
See also The Fair Use/Fair Dealing Handbook, by Jonathan Band and Jonathan Gerafi. policybandwidth, April 2013.
CODE OF BEST PRACTICES IN
FAIR USE FOR
ACADEMIC AND
RESEARCH LIBRARIES
Association of Research Lilbraries (ARL)
"The mission of academic and research librarians is to enable teaching, learning, and research. 1 (This code was developed by and for academic and research librarians. While some of the ideas and principles in the code may be helpful to librarians in other contexts, any reference to "librarians" in this document refers to academic and research librarians, not to all librarians.) Along with serving current faculty, researchers, and students (especially graduate students), these librarians also serve the general public, to whom academic and research libraries are often open. Finally, academic and research librarians are committed to faculty, researchers, and students of the future, who depend on the responsible collection, curation, and preservation of materials over time." (January 2012)
Coordinators: Association of Research Libraries; Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University; Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law, American University
Endorsed by: American Library Association; Association of College and Research Libraries; College Art Association
Visual Resources Association: Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study
Visual Resources Association (VRA)
"The Visual Resources Association, the international organization of image media professionals dedicated to furthering research and education in the field of image management, has released a Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study. The Statement describes six uses of copyrighted still images that the VRA believes fall within the U.S. doctrine of fair use. The six uses are: 1) preservation (storing images for repeated use in a teaching context and transferring images to new formats); 2) use of images for teaching purposes; 3) use of images (both large, high-resolution images and thumbnails) on course websites and in other online study materials; 4) adaptations of images for teaching and classroom work by students; 5) sharing images among educational and cultural institutions to facilitate teaching and study; and 6) reproduction of images in theses and dissertations." (December 2011)
Endorsed by: College Art Association
AAMD Policy on the Use of "Thumbnail" Digital Images in Museum Online Initiatives
Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD)
"The principal purpose of art museums is education. While the purpose remains the same, the means and methods of accomplishing this goal continue to evolve, nowhere more so than with respect to the internet. In particular, the need for the availability of scholarly materials on the internet grows in importance as use of the internet escalates. While acknowledging that the technology of electronic information changes and transforms on an almost daily basis, this dynamic growth demonstrates the need for the application of basic principles so that the integrity of the image, the interests of museums and the publics they serve and the rights of the artist can all be harmonized. Integral to the museum's accomplishment of its mission to educate is the statutory right of fair use embodied in United States copyright law. AAMD reaffirms the critical importance of this legal exception to the missions of its members and believes that the application of fair use to internet media can be enhanced through reasonable guidelines to be established and followed by art museums." (January 19, 2011)
The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University, Washington DC
"This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances—especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question—as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities."
Endorsed by: Action Coalition for Media Education; Media Education Foundation; National Association for Media Literacy Education; National Council of Teachers of English; Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association (as of April 2011)
Well-intentioned Practice for Putting Digitized Collections of Unpublished Materials Online
OCLC
"The primary responsibilities of cultural materials repositories - stewardship and support for research and learning - require us to provide access to materials entrusted to our care. This document establishes a reasonable community of practice that increases and significantly improves access to collections of unpublished materials by placing them online for the purpose of furthering research and learning. Although it promotes a well-intentioned, practical approach to identifying and resolving rights issues that is in line with professional and ethical standards, note that this document does not concern itself with what individuals who access particular items may do with them. While the document was developed with US law in mind, it is hoped that the spirit of the document will resonate in non-US contexts."
Endorsed and/or supported by: Art Libraries Society of North America; Joint National Committee on Archives, Libraries and Museums; Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association; RLG Partnership Council; Triangle Research Libraries Network
Society for Cinema and Media Studies' Statement of Fair Use Best Practices for Media Studies Publishing
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
"This code of best practices in scholarly publishing was created by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies to serve scholars in film and media studies."
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies' Statement of Best Practices for Fair Use in Teaching for Film and Media Educators
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
"The Society for Cinema and Media Studies ("SCMS") has created this Statement of Best Practices for its membership to clarify some of the issues concerning the permissible use of media for teaching."
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry
Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University,Washington DC; The Poetry Foundation
"This code of best practices helps poets understand when they and others have the right to excerpt, quote and use copyrighted material in poetry. To create this code, poets came together to articulate their common expectations, facilitated by Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media; Katharine Coles, director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation; Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law in the Washington College of Law at American University; and Jennifer Urban, Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley."
Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use
Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers; Independent Feature Project; International Documentary Association; National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture; Women in Film & Video (Washington, D.C., chapter)
"Documentary filmmakers have created, through their professional associations, a clear, easy to understand statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use. Fair Use is the right, in some circumstances, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying for it. It is a crucial feature of copyright law. In fact, it is what keeps copyright from being censorship. You can invoke fair use when the value to the public of what you are saying outweighs the cost to the private owner of the copyright."
Endorsed by: Arts Engine; Bay Area Video Coalition; CINE; Doculink; Electronic Arts Intermix; Full Frame Festival; Independent Television Service; Joost; Kartemquin Films; National Video Resources; P.O.V./American Documentary; University Film and Video Association; Video Association of Dallas; Women Make Movies; Video Association of Dallas (as of April 2011)
Fair Use Principles for User Generated Video Content
"Online video hosting services like YouTube are ushering in a new era of free expression online. By providing a home for "user-generated content" (UGC) on the Internet, these services enable creators to reach a global audience without having to depend on traditional intermediaries like television networks and movie studios. The result has been an explosion of creativity by ordinary people, who have enthusiastically embraced the opportunities created by these new technologies to express themselves in a remarkable variety of ways."
Endorsed by: Electronic Frontier Foundation ; Center for Social Media, School of Communications, American University; Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law; American University; Public Knowledge; Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School; ACLU of Northern California (as of April 2011)
Best Practices in Fair Use of Dance-Related Materials
Dance Heritage Coalition, Washington DC
"This Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use of Dance-related Materials, produced by the Dance Heritage Coalition, clarifies what librarians, archivists, curators, and others working with dance-related materials currently regard as a reasonable application of the Copyright Act's fair use doctrine, where the use of copyrighted materials is essential to significant cultural missions and institutional goals."
Endorsed by: Congress on Research in Dance; Dance critics Association; Dance Films Association; National Dance Education Organization; Society of Dance History Scholars; Theatre Library Association (as of April 2011)
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication
International Communication Association and Patricia Aufderheide, Center for Social Media, School of Communication, and Peter Jaszi, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law, American University
"This document is a code of best practices that helps U.S. communication scholars to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances—especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question."
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video
Patricia Aufderheide, Center for Social Media, School of Communication, and Peter Jaszi, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law, American University
"This document is a code of best practices that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances."
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare
A COMMITTEE OF PRACTITIONERS OF OPENCOURSEWARE IN THE UNITED STATES
"This document is a code of best practices designed to help those preparing OpenCourseWare (OCW) to interpret and apply fair use under United States copyright law."
Best Practices in the Fair Use of Copyrighted Materials in Music Scholarship
American Musicological Society
"This document was written over a period of several years by an ad hoc committee of AMS Council, and formally adopted by the Board of Directors in March 2010."
READINGS & REFERENCES
"Myths About Fair Use," by Patricia Aufderheide, Inside Higher Ed, August 2, 2011
Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011)
Fair Use of Images in the Classroom: How Far is Fair?, by Christine L. Sundt, presented in the session, Fair Use; Who Has the Rights?, College Art Association annual conference, Seattle, WA, February 2004.
Fair Use of Copyrighted Materials [From the pen of Georgia Harper at the University of Texas System, including "Rules of Thumb for Digitizing and Using Images for Educational Purposes"]
"Perspectives on Fair Use, Education, and Libraries," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Volume 50, Number 14 (1999). Online ISSN: 1097-4571 Print ISSN: 0002-8231 (Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Copyright and Fair Use: The Great Image Debate. A special issue of Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, edited by Robert A. Baron (Volume 12, Number 3/4, 1997)
Copyright, Fair Use, and the Challenge for Universities: Promoting the Progress of Higher Education (1993) / Kenneth D. Crews
"The answers to some of [the] most common clearance questions don't really lie in the realm of "fair use" at all, but fall under the heading of "free use." "Yes, you can!" –Where you don't even need 'fair use,' by Peter Jaszi, Washington College of Law, American University
A proposal to assist in requesting permissions – a ‘fair use’ test - developed by Tom Bower, National Museum of American History, for the CAA/NINCH Copyright Town Meeting, Chicago, 2001, available for examination online at http://www.pipeline.com/~rabaron/CIP/CAAdoc2.htm. This document is currently under review by the AAMD and the Committee on Intellectual Property, College Art Association (Patricia Failing, Chair)
“Checklist for Conducting a Fair Use Analysis Before Using Copyrighted Materials” - http://copyright.cornell.edu/policies/docs/Fair_Use_Checklist.pdf (Revised for use by Cornell University from “Checklist for Fair Use,” a project of the IUPUI Copyright Management Center, directed by Kenneth D. Crews, Associate Dean of the Faculties for Copyright Management)
Brown University: Copyright and Fair Use
Stanford University Libraries: Copyright and Fair Use
UK Copyright Service Factsheet ‘Understanding Fair Use’: http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use (2004). A brief but useful definition of the notion of ‘fair use’ and 'fair dealing.'