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fair use

A Fair Use Primer (links)

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What is Fair Use? “under many conditions, fair use allows you to copy, display and publish copyrighted works without payment or permission. The doctrine — which complements the First Amendment — helps courts avoid rigid application of copyright law where rigid application would ‘stifle the very creativity which the law is designed to foster.’  Against this backdrop, fair use can be looked at as a balancing act.  It is an imperfect attempt to reconcile the competing ideals of free speech with the property rights of individual creators. While invaluable to both the scholar and the pitchman, it should be noted that fair use is not a right but a defense to copyright infringement.   As such, it should be looked upon as a privilege, and not a right.”  (via Copylaw.com)

It’s not a right, but a defense to copyright infringement. “The difficulty in claiming fair use is that there is no predictable way to guarantee that your use will actually qualify as a fair use. You may believe that your use qualifies–but, if the copyright owner disagrees, you may have to resolve the dispute in a courtroom. Even if you ultimately persuade the court that your use was in fact a fair use, the expense and time involved in litigation may well outweigh any benefit of using the material in the first place.”  (via Stanford University Libraries)

How is Fair Use Determined? “Section 107 of the Copyright Act lists four factors to help you determine types of content usage that may be considered fair use. No one factor alone dictates whether a particular use is indeed fair use. Consideration of all four factors is needed to help determine whether or not copyright permission is required.  Fair use is not a straightforward concept; therefore, any fair use analysis must be conducted on a case-by-case basis considering all four factors and the circumstances of the situation at hand.  Before applying these factors to your situation, identify if the use is for criticism, comment, news reporting, education, scholarship or research. If the answer is no, obtain copyright permission to use the content.” (via The Campus Guide to Copyright Clearance)

What if neither the copyright holder nor the user can afford a lawyer?  Setting best practices might help. “poets communicated a general sense that their ability to do their work with confidence was often impeded by institutional regulations based on very straitened interpretations of copyright. They lacked clear guidance as to what material might be available in the public domain. Moreover, they were constrained by their own lack of certainty about what uses are and are not fair within the practices of poetry. While they certainly wish to appropriately control their own work, and to make money where money is to be made, poets also expressed a strong wish to affirm the importance of their ability to make reasonable unlicensed uses of copyrighted material and their support for such uses by others of their own works.” (via the Center for Social Media’s Code to Best Practices for Fair Use in Poetry)

 

The Google Books Decision (links)

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The decision is in.  “Google Inc.’s six-year struggle to bring all the world’s books to the Internet suffered another big setback at the hands of a federal judge.  Judge Denny Chin, in a ruling filed in U.S. district court in Manhattan, rejected a 2008 settlement that Google forged with author and publisher groups to make millions of books available online. The 48-page decision concludes that the $125 million deal would give the Internet giant the ability to ‘exploit’ books without the permission of copyright owners.  ‘While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,’ Judge Chin wrote, Google’s current pact would ‘simply go too far.’ The deal would ‘give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission,’ he said.  He also suggested a way to revise the deal: rather than let copyright owners of books ‘opt out’ of the settlement, copyright owners should be given the choice to ‘opt in.'” (via Wall Street Journal)

This deal would have created astonishing precedents. “The settlement is especially controversial because it uses class action law to affect the rights of a breathtakingly broad array of authors and publishers. In approving a class action settlement, a judge must determine if it fairly represents the interests of the affected parties—in this case, millions of copyright holders. And those copyright holders have not been shy about voicing their displeasure.  Most importantly, the proposed settlement was far more ambitious than the underlying legal dispute. ‘The case was about the use of an indexing and searching tool,’ Judge Chin wrote, ‘not the sale of complete copyrighted works.’ Yet the settlement gave Google broad latitude to open an online books store to sell copies of many of the books it has scanned.  And crucially, through the legal fiction of the class action mechanism, the settlement gives Google the right to sell copies of ‘orphan works’ whose copyright holders—by definition—cannot otherwise give their permission.” (via Ars Technica)

And not just for authors. “Unlike the privacy you normally experience online, Google’s current practices show it is capable of compiling ‘dossiers’ that reveal our lives in intimate detail. These dossiers may be shared across Google products or with partners, civil litigants, and law enforcement without clear standards for review. Other online bookstores raise similar concerns, but Google is the company seeking federal court approval of what may well become the world’s largest digital book repository — so it must lead the way in protecting online reader privacy and anonymity.” (via EFF)

It also highlights the need for a real ‘Orphan Works’ solution for everyone. “The effect of this was that the agreement essentially rewrote copyright law for Google and Google only. It would give Google the right to sell copies books it didn’t have the rights to—’orphan works’ that are still under copyright, but where the copyright owner can’t be found. Selling full-text copies of copyrighted works without permission is not a traditional fair use—and it’s not what Google was doing when it got sued, to begin with.  As for orphan works, Congress needs to act.  The law needs to be fixed to allow orphan works to be used in reasonable ways while respecting that they’re still under copyright.  It’s great that Google and the Guild thought creatively about how to pay any orphan works rights-holders who eventually came forward, but a situation where the orphan works problem is ‘solved’ by creating a monopoly digital library is untenable. If Google is able to exploit orphan works, then anyone else should be able to on the same terms.” (via Public Knowledge)

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