If You Could Be the Judge of Fair Use…

By the Center for Media and Social Impact

Is fair use a “grey area”? Not if you know the law. Then it’s a flexible, robust tool for digital culture. Test your knowledge!

Happy Fair Use Week! Fair use, the right to reuse someone else’s copyrighted material for new purposes that don’t intrude on the copyright holder’s market, is often described as “risky,” “uncertain,” or a “grey area.” But today’s fair use has become a pretty low-risk, high-value activity. In fact, it’s so routine that a lot of people don’t even realize they’re employing fair use. Students quote scholars in their term papers–that’s fair use. Journalists quote from corporate documents–ditto. Television news features someone whose ringtone accidentally goes off–also fair use. Filmmakers use fair use to make their points visually or auditorally (for instance a montage of riffs from pop-songs connoting a historical moment, or a collage of magazine covers, TV news clips and audio). Podcasters include clips from a news program to catch you up, to critique it, or to illustrate a point. Again, fair use.

Read the full blog: https://cmsimpact.org/fair-use-blog/if-you-could-be-the-judge-of-fair-use/