Fair Use Week

These are your rights….

While my library is having a couple of formal events I’m plugging Fair Use week in my blog (theconfirmationbias).     The usual disclaimer that I am not a lawyer AND, in this case, this is me as an individual not me representing Notre Dame!

The Clash’s  Know Your Rights  with its frightening warning that “You have the right to free speech as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it” is just as timely today as it was in 1982 when it was released.

You probably know that the right to free speech is in the first amendment, along with the right to free assembly and the prohibition against any religious test for participation in this, our happy republic.  But you might not know that our intellectual property law ALSO starts in the first amendment.  Yup, intellectual property law is the love child of the first amendment and Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution.

Collette Mak
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Fair Use and Copyright First Responders Infographic

Fair use provisions of the copyright law allow use of copyrighted materials on a limited basis for specific purposes without requiring the permission of the copyright holder. This infographic, made by Harvard Library’s Copyright First Responders, details the current state of the law, including the four factors, transformative uses, and cases for reference which are linked to openly licensed resources.

Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week 2016 Highlights Balance in Copyright System

*Cross-posted from ARL News*

On February 22–26, 136 organizations and numerous individuals participated in Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week 2016, an annual celebration of the important—and flexible—doctrines of fair use and fair dealing. This year’s event was organized by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and participants included universities, libraries, library associations, and many other organizations, such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the R Street Institute, Re:Create, and Wikimedia.

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Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week 2016 Highlights Balance in Copyright System

On February 22–26, 136 organizations and numerous individuals participated in Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week 2016, an annual celebration of the important—and flexible—doctrines of fair use and fair dealing. This year’s event was organized by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and participants included universities, libraries, library associations, and many other organizations, such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the R Street Institute, Re:Create, and Wikimedia.

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Filing and Winning a Fair Use Suit Against Copyrightholders for Bad Faith Takedown

On October 13, 2010, a Korean high court affirmed a lower court ruling that a 53-seconds-long video clip posted on a blog, showing a 5-year-old humming along to a copyrighted song, constitutes a fair use, and ordered a copyright society to pay the poster damages for unjustly requesting a takedown under the Korean notice-and-takedown system. The judgment was not appealed by the copyright society and has now become final.

K.S. Park
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Three Famous Fair Use Cases

The following is a guest post by Julie Grob, coordinator for instruction in Special Collections at the University of Houston Libraries. This week, we’ll feature posts by members of the UH Libraries Copyright Team highlighting Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week 2016. 

Three Famous Fair Use Cases

Three Famous Fair Use Cases

What do the rap group 2 Live Crew, kitschy artist Jeff Koons, and pop punk band Green Day have in common? They have all been at the center of legal cases in which their use of an image or a piece of music by another artist was ultimately ruled to be fair use.

In 2 Live Crew’s case, they borrowed the familiar lyrics and bassline from Roy Orbison’s song “Pretty Woman” for their satiric song “Pretty Woman.” Koons incorporated a fashion photo of a woman’s feet clad in sandals in his painting “Niagara.” And Green Day modified a piece of street art by Dereck Seltzer for a video that played onstage during concerts on their 2009-10 tour. In each case, the court ruled in favor of the repurposing creators.

Julie Grob