Copyright and Fair Use

Copyright protectionists decry copying as theft and plagiarism--and let's just acknowledge here that sometimes it is. (Copying a work and re-using it for its original market purpose and not paying the owner what he or she is selling or renting it for is wrong.) The well-funded efforts of copyright owners' organizations to promote this message, though, has thoroughly confused many people about their Fair Use rights. In many situations, including making new work and analyzing or critiquing existing work, people in the U.S. Read more...

Last week, Electronic Frontier Foundation featured EFF Board Chairman Brad Templeton's remix of the popular meme "the bunker scene" from the 2004 film Downfall. This clip has been remixed in various formats, but now (thanks to Brad) we've got a version that not only employs Fair Use but explains Fair Use. Read EFF's article titled When Fair Use Is Fairly Difficult for more details on the process of creating this clip.

Watch the clip below.Read more...

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. Read more...

On day two of the Copyright Office’s hearings about exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) , documentary filmmakers and remix artists and their supporters came to Washington, D.C. to show regulators the cost of criminalizing copying of popular culture. (Read about day one where the focus was on Fair Use and educators here.)Read more...

The best theater in Washington, D.C. is in federal agencies and hearing rooms. That’s where ritual battles over power take place. The first day of the Copyright Office’s hearings about exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act pretty much met expectations. (Read about day two where the focus was on Fair Use for documentarians and remix artists, here.)Read more...