Tag Archives: fair use week

Fair Use

Fair use is for students, and artists, and researchers, and …

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Last Fair Use Week post!  Today I want to highlight, via a short video, a student project here at Duke that demonstrates really well the kinds of common transformative uses that fair use supports on campus. “Transformative use” has become a major part of the fair use analysis, starting from when Judge Pierre Leval articulated the concept in his 1990 article, Toward a Fair Use Standard.  In 1994, the Supreme Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc. explained:

“The central purpose of this investigation is to see, in Justice Story’s words, whether the new work merely “supersede[s] the objects” of the original creation, or instead adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message; it asks, in other words, whether and to what extent the new work is “transformative.” . . . Such works thus lie at the heart of the fair use doctrine’s guarantee of breathing space within the confines of copyright, and the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use.” (citations omitted)

Changing purpose by adding new “expression, meaning or message” to the works of others represents much of what is done with material in special collections and archives. Those reworkings can come in the form of scholarly commentary, new artistic works, or even class projects.  Below you’ll find a video about an interesting combination of those things.

This project sprung out of a course taught at Duke last semester by Professor Kearsley Stewart on Global Narratives of HIV/AIDS. Students in the course were asked to work with the papers of medical anthropologist Maria de Bruyn, a collection held by Duke’sDavid Rubenstein Rare Books & Manuscript Library. Among that collection are materials from conferences which document views (some of which are highly negative) about individuals and groups affected by HIV/AIDS. 

Students, including Ryan Fitzgerald who is in the video, went through those materials and were asked to assess them and comment on them through their own reworkings of the originals. They made copies of the originals and then employed Humumentism,  as laid out by Tom Phillips in his book A Humument, to work over the texts with their own artistic expression to create a new narrative. If you’re interested, you can read more about the class and its collaboration with the Rubenstein Library, the workshop the class held with poet Kelly Swain, and watch the these three videos (1, 2, and 3) of Duke Students Ryan Fitzgerald, Sarah Rapaport, and Edom Tilahun presenting on their work.  A special thanks especially to Ryan Fitzgerald, Rachel Ingold and Kearsley Stewart for help and information for the video. 

Happy fair use week!

Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use, Uncategorized

Fair Use is for Innovation

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[cross-posted from the Copyright at Harvard Library Blog and written for Fair Use Week]

Remember Betamax? I do, but mostly for the fair use case that it precipitated, Sony Corp. v. Universal Studios, Inc. That case was decided by the Supreme Court in 1984. Among other things, it stands for the proposition that fair use allows for copying of copyrighted works for personal, non-transformative purposes, such as in-home recording of television shows to view at a later time. Betamax machines aren’t particularly relevant anymore, but the approach on how courts should apply fair use in light of technological change, as outlined in the case, is as relevant now, as ever.

Fair use and the purpose of copyright

At this point, personal home copying is commonplace; we do it all the time with home DVRs, when we back up our computers and phones, and when we transfer mp3s from an old device to a new one. It’s worth remembering that the legality of this sort of everyday copying, and the legality of the technology that supports it, wasn’t always accepted.

One of the issues that the Betamax case brought to a head was what courts should do when faced with new technology that makes following the literal terms of the Copyright Act result in legal outcomes that don’t match up with copyright’s underlying purpose. The Betamax court framed the issue this way:

“The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an `author’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good. `The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the monopoly,’ this Court has said, `lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.’  When technological change has rendered its literal terms ambiguous, the Copyright Act must be construed in light of this basic purpose.” (citations omitted).

Fair use is one of the tools that gives courts some flexibility in construing the terms of the Copyright Act in light of its basic constitutional purpose. It is an “equitable rule of reason” that gives courts requires courts to “avoid rigid application of the Copyright Statute when on occasion it would stifle the very creativity which that law was designed to foster.” In that role, fair use has, through the years, facilitated all sorts of technological advancements, from video game development to plagiarism detection software to search engines to image search.

ReDigi and digital resale

One area where we are seeing some interesting emerging innovation is in technology that facilitates secondary markets for digital copies. As a result of so much invention in personal copying and storage devices (and distribution mechanisms to get content to those devices), we now find ourselves in a situation where users have legitimately purchased copies of works for which they never obtained a physical copy. iTunes is the most prominent example, where $0.99 will buy you an mp3 and a variety of other files.

What users can do with those copies is an interesting question. In the past, purchasers of physical copies of books or records could resell, lend, or even destroy the copies they purchased. Congress and the courts recognized that it was desirable for such secondary uses to go unimpeded by copyright, and so crafted a limit on the ability of copyright holders to control downstream distributions of their works after the “first sale” of the copy.

For digital copies, however, the question is a bit more complicated. Users who want to resell or lend their digital copies may be free to “distribute,” but reselling or lending digital copies also, technically, requires a reproduction of the file from one device to the next. The first sale rules, at least as codified in the statute, only address distribution and not reproduction, so technically these resales don’t fall within its scope.

This seems like a prime opportunity for fair use to jump in and bridge the gap between the strict terms of the Copyright Act and the underlying purpose of what the Act is trying to achieve. That’s precisely the issue currently being argued on appeal by a company called ReDigi, which has setup its own online market place for reselling your unused iTunes files. ReDigi lost before the lower court, but it is now taking up its case before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

As with the Betamax case, the implications for other applications of fair use extend far beyond the immediate uses that ReDigi seeks to make in reselling mp3s. Among other things, it could facilitate library lending of e-books (as argued in this excellent amicus brief from ALA, ACRL, and ARL and Internet Archive), and could relieve all sorts of legal concerns about transferring and providing access to born-digital archival materials.  It’s the kind of case that could also fuel the vision outlined by Internet Archive in its ambitious $100 million, 4 million book digital-lending project.

Whether or not ReDigi wins this particular battle, I think it’s worth celebrating that fair use has provided the flexibility to pursue these sorts of innovations in the past that help fulfill the Copyright Act’s Constitutional purpose of promoting progress.

Authors' Rights, Fair Use

Fair Use for Authors

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Happy fair use week! I’m sure many of you have already taken note that February 20 to 24 is a week-long celebration of copyright’s fair use doctrine. The organizers at fairuseweek.org have done a great job collecting information about events and sharing resources. This ARL-commissioned fair use myths infographic is among my favorites.

One of the things I plan to do this week is talk about how important fair use is for authors. Duke, like many universities, is home to thousands of faculty and student authors who produce a tremendous quantity of creative work. In support of them, on February 23,  the Duke University Libraries Office of Copyright & Scholarly Communication will host a workshop for graduate student authors who have questions about fair use in writing their dissertations and for other writing projects. If you’re at Duke and interested, we invite you to click the link above and register!

Why Authors’ Perspectives on Fair Use Matter

At our fair use workshop I intend to emphasize to those grad students the importance of expressing their views, as authors, about what types of copying and reuse they believe are reasonable under fair use. To frame that discussion,  I plan to have participants talk about this perspective given by the Supreme Court in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, which does a nice job highlighting the special relationship that authors have with the fair use doctrine:

“[T]he author’s consent to a reasonable use of his copyrighted works ha[d] always been implied by the courts as a necessary incident of the constitutional policy of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, since a prohibition of such use would inhibit subsequent writers from attempting to improve upon prior works and thus . . . frustrate the very ends sought to be attained.” Professor Latman, in a study of the doctrine of fair use commissioned by Congress for the revision effort . . . summarized prior law as turning on the “importance of the material copied or performed from the point of view of the reasonable copyright owner. In other words, would the reasonable copyright owner have consented to the use?” (citations omitted).

Reflecting on that quote, sometimes I think our understanding about author perspectives on copyright has been dominated by those who have strong economic interests in the sale of their work. For many years, groups such as the Authors Guild have been vocal advocates for their membership, which includes many trade book authors. But there are many other authors (historically, less vocal) with a different perspective, who create with sharing and readership as their dominant motivation, not making money. That includes many academics.

Authors Alliance

One group, the Authors Alliance (I am a member), has taken up the job of “promot[ing] authorship for the public good by supporting authors who write to be read.”  Authors Alliance has been working to give a powerful platform from which the views of these authors, including many academics, can be expressed. One of the issues that Authors Alliance has focused on is the importance of a strong fair use right for authors.

A good example comes from an amicus brief that Authors Alliance recently filed in the Georgia State University fair use e-reserves case. That case was initially brought in 2008 against GSU by Cambridge University Press,  Oxford University Press and Sage. It’s now on its second appeal before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case is largely about whether it was permissible under the fair use doctrine for GSU faculty to make excerpts of academic books available to students through the GSU electronic course reserves system.

Even though the GSU suit has been ongoing for nearly nine years (!), as far as I can tell, no one has bothered to give the courts the perspective of the actual authors of the excerpts at issue in that case. In its recent amicus brief, Authors Alliance did just that.  In a page and a half of direct quotes, the brief highlights some straightforward but until-now undocumented views of the authors who wrote the chapters and books used by GSU faculty in their classes. These included, for example, quotes like “I want my work to be read as widely as possible. I have no trouble with articles or individual chapters of my book being copied for use in the classroom. In fact, I welcome it.” (Carolyn Ellis, Professor of Communication at University of South Florida and an Authors Alliance member).

While the brief does a fantastic job of working through thorny legal questions about the application of copyright law to educational use of academic works, to me the most powerful and persuasive parts of the brief  are the statements from authors themselves about what they think should be permissible, and why. I don’t know whether those quotes will leave the same impression on the appellate court, but I am optimistic.

So, authors: speak up! Talk about why fair use is important for your own work and how it has helped you. And talk about how you want your work to be used by others, whether in the classroom, in new research and scholarship, or by readers more generally.