Fair Use and Academic Freedom: Here Come the Communications Scholars

At the annual meeting of the International Communication Association a group of us formed a committee to create a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Communication Scholarship. Chris Boulton, a grad student at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, kicked it off with a story of not being permitted to file his M.A. thesis until he took out all copyrighted material. The problem was that the copyrighted material—pictures of children’s fashion advertisements—were the thesis’s core data. Other scholars in the room pointed to other practices that needed clarification. Could professors studying advertisements share their collected research materials with other scholars? Could they include excerpts from popular songs in electronically published journal articles? Members of the ICA will receive a survey prepared by the committee shortly, and by next year the group hopes to shape a Code, with the help of the Washington College of Law and the Center for Social Media.