Fair Use Question of the Month: Resources for Teaching Fair Use

For this month's fair use question, a teacher working on the syllabus for an upcoming film production course is looking for tools to help him teach fair use more confidently to his students.

Dear Center for Social Media,

I'm teaching a film production class in the Fall and want to incorporate fair use into my syllabus, but fair use is somewhat outside of my area of expertise.  Could you recommend any resources that would help me teach fair use more confidently?

Daniel

Daniel,

You can find quite a few teaching tools on our website that can help you.  A great new addition is Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi's book, Reclaiming Fair Use: How To Put Balance Back In Copyright. Check out excerpts from the book here, and the book is available online at Amazon.com if you're interested in assigning the book to your students. 

In terms of online tools, on our website you can find fair use language for syllabi, grading rubrics, examples of successful fair use in documentary film, fair use scenarios, powerpoints with lecture notes and more.  And if you're in the Boston area on August 3rd, you can learn more at the 2011 UFVA Conference's "Fair Use: In The Classroom, the Library and the Field" panel at Emerson College featuring CSM's Pat Aufderheide and Katie Bieze.

Thanks for the question, and good luck to you and your students!