Fair Use

Filmmakers, students, teachers and professors have again successfully asserted their fair use rights to break encryption on DVDs. The U.S. Copyright Office has renewed previous exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), with some tweaks and a couple of expansion clauses. Read more...

It's happened again: Bogus claims of copyright infringement brought down perfectly legitimate content--this time while a lot of people were watching. Read more...

Dear Center for Social Media,

I'm a newbie high school English teacher, and one of my assignments this year will be for students to make remakes or remixes of Shakespeare plays. I showed our principal some of your work--the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video, and the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. She's approved the assignment, so thanks! Now I'd like to do a quick overview of fair use for my students at the beginning of the semester. What's the best way to explain what they can and can't do, in terms of copyright, for this assignment?  Read more...

At the second annual Wikipedia conference to be held in the U.S., copyright issues pervaded the discussions among folks from 83 (!) countries. Of course it did: Wikipedia is a reader-built encyclopedia that promises free content world-wide. And it’s doing that job in the middle of a sea of copyrighted content.Read more...

This month's fair use question comes from an employee in the IT department at  a university library who is looking to take advantage of fair use in order to fulfill a professor's request.

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