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Copyright and Free Expression

Parody is one example of how copyright law’s fair use doctrine protects free expression.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a parody is “an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.”  In our modern culture, parody exists in a range of media, including art, literature, television, and music.  Some famous examples of parody in film include Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and Austin Powers.  Saturday Night Live and Weird Al Yankovic also rely on parody.

Fair use — which protects parody — is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by allowing the public to use copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright holder.  The statutory framework for fair use is found in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.  Section 107 enumerates the following four factors, which must be evaluated to determine whether a use is fair:

  • Factor 1: Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
  • Factor 2: Nature of the copyrighted work
  • Factor 3: Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
  • Factor 4: Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

Read more: https://dsi.appstate.edu/news/copyright-and-free-expression

Fair Dealing Week highlights critical component of affordable, rigorous university education

Campaign draws attention to important copyright exception that balances user and creator rights to accommodate freedom of speech and expression

Fair Dealing and Copyright at uOttawa: A Guide for Professors, Researchers, and Students to mark Fair Dealing Week 2024

Canadian copyright law provides a framework to protect the rights of creators while also balancing these with the needs of users to access and make use of materials. One crucial aspect of this delicate balance is the concept of fair dealing, which allows uses of materials subject to copyright without the need for permission, as long as the dealing is considered fair.

Read more: https://www.uottawa.ca/library/news-all/fair-dealing-copyright-university-ottawa

Fair Dealing Week 2024

Leeds Beckett University

By Library and Student Services | 05 February 2024

What is Fair Dealing? You might also have heard the term “Fair Use”, the equivalent legal term in the USA. Whenever you’re using copyrighted material, whether it’s with the permission of the copyright holder or under an exemption, your use must be “Fair Dealing” – namely the amount you’re using has to feel fair to the copyright holder. For example, using a whole copyrighted journal article as part of an academic work probably wouldn’t be fair to the copyright holder. Using sections of an author’s argument to convey their position, referring it to wider scholarship or developing your own argument in response to their position, would probably be fair use.

Read More: https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/blogs/library/2024/02/fair-dealing-week-2024/

Fair Use Week 2024: Q&A with Columbia University Libraries Director of Copyright Advisory Services Rina Pantalony

Fair Use Week 2024: Q&A with Director of Copyright Advisory Services Rina Pantalony

Rina Pantalony, Director of
Copyright Services

With Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week approaching from February 26 through March 1, we sat down with Columbia University Libraries Director of Copyright Services Rina Pantalony to dissect what fair use means, how to determine whether or not you are within the boundaries of fair use, and the role fair use plays in today’s world.

Read more: https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/spotlights/2024/02/20/fair-use-week-2024-qa-with-director-of-copyright-advisory-services-rina-pantalony/

Two Questions on Fair Use: Interview with Nabiha Syed

For this year’s Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, MediaWell is partnering with the Association of Research Libraries to interview experts reflecting on how fair use supports research, journalism, and truth. This is the fourth and final installment of MediaWell’s four-part series, entitled “Two Questions on Fair Use.” In this interview, we ask Nabiha Syed, president of The Markup, about how the problem of misinformation requires discretion from people looking to exercise fair use, and how fair use supports people who share information independently.

Read the interview on MediaWell’s website.

Can fair use help combat misinformation on social media?

One of the things I love about fair use is that it creates this carve out from a copyright infrastructure that otherwise could pose a lot of downstream restrictions for a creator or a commentator or a person engaging in a critique. That’s the reason why Justice Ginsburg said that fair use doctrine was a built-in free speech safeguard. We want to engage with cultural conversation, with topics of great public interest, and we want to be able to point to them and say, “I’m not sure I agree with that,” or “there’s a detail that’s missing here, or “let me tell you about how my research really supports this in a way that might be counterintuitive.”

What’s tricky about misinformation is that while you can say, “Let me take snippets of the misinformation and rebut it or debunk it, or fact check it,” fair use permits you to do that. But there’s an open question about whether the psychological research actually supports that as a good thing to do.

Fair use clears the way for us to be able to say, “Okay, here is a rumor that’s spreading about how JFK Jr. is going to come back and turn Donald Trump into the president,” which I think was circulating a couple months ago. We can take that snippet because fair use allows us to, and have that clip or take that quote and comment on it, which is all well and good and should happen. But in a journalistic environment, do we want to be recirculating it? Do we want to be amplifying it? These are a really interesting set of questions. I’m not sure it’s the right tactic, but I’m glad that fair use at least gives us the chance to engage.

For researchers who are working on a different time horizon than journalists, the ability to really dig in, to create a historical record of this kind of misinformation, to document how it flows, that wouldn’t be possible without fair use. For that use case, I think it’s tremendously necessary to document this strange time that we’re in, and the many flavors of misinformation. But for the news journalistic context that I operate in, I worry a little bit about just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

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Two Questions on Fair Use: Interview with Alex Abdo

For this year’s Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, MediaWell is partnering with the Association of Research Libraries to interview experts reflecting on how fair use supports research, journalism, and truth. This is the third of MediaWell’s four-part series, entitled “Two Questions on Fair Use” in which we ask Alex Abdo, the litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, about the key issues surrounding researchers’ and journalists’ access to data, as well as legislative efforts to promote platform transparency for researchers. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Read the interview on MediaWell’s website.

What would you think are the key issues for scholars and journalists to know right now about access to data?

One of the most important subjects of research at the moment is our online world, and researchers and journalists are trying to educate the public about what our new online sphere portends for society. Is public discourse online being manipulated or distorted by the platforms that host and curate conversations online, or by malicious third parties who try to hijack conversations or hijack the machinery of content moderation to advance their agenda at the expense of the public interest?

But it is extremely difficult to study those questions because you need data to study them, and the platforms, for their part, tend to be pretty stingy in the data they make available to researchers and journalists. And so there are many, many journalists and researchers now who try to study the platforms independently, by acquiring data through their own means, either by recruiting volunteers to their studies to enable research, or by collecting data directly themselves for their studies.

The problem is that the platforms tend to view those kinds of activities as violations of their terms of service; they tend to view them as illegal. And the platforms, and I’m mainly thinking of Facebook here, have threatened researchers and journalists who engage in these public interest investigations with cease-and-desist letters, threats of litigation, with the effect of shutting down some of these individual research projects or causing them to change in ways that make them less useful to the public.

Maybe even more troubling is the fact that these threats cast a broader chill on the research community. There are many researchers who don’t take up these sorts of investigations because they don’t want to have to worry about a corporate behemoth like Facebook sending them a legal threat and a legal demand that they don’t have the resources or the institutional backing to fight. So that, to my mind, is one of the most important areas where we need research and study, but where corporate terms of use have created an enormous blind spot for humanity.

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Two Questions on Fair Use: Interview with Rebekah Tromble

For this year’s Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, MediaWell is partnering with the Association of Research Libraries to interview experts reflecting on how fair use supports research, journalism, and truth. This is the second of MediaWell’s four-part series, entitled “Two Questions on Fair Use” in which we ask Rebekah Tromble—director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics and associate professor in the School of Media & Public Affairs at George Washington University—about how fair use enables computational social science research, but also how limitations on fair use imposed by social media platforms constrain research and teaching about political discourse online.

Read the interview on MediaWell’s website.

How does the copyright environment affect what kind of research & scholarship is conducted, and why does this matter for society? For democracy?

I think that I can share from my perspective, as someone who studies political information and political discourse in the digital space, meaning everything from blogs, to websites, to of course social media, but also mass media that’s produced online and shared online. The rules and regulations around copyright, in many instances, wind up making the kind of core scientific endeavor quite challenging, particularly because under the best practices of the scientific method, you would ideally share the core data, the baseline data, so that others can deeply investigate the work that you’ve done and ensure that you’ve followed the proper methodology and replicate it as appropriate.

In the area that I work in, computational social science, we’re doing a lot of things like building out algorithmic models to detect and understand various concepts or various phenomena. Having that underlying data available is essential. It’s really, really important. And so we’re sometimes hindered by the fact that, for example, if I’m using a great deal of data pulled from mass media outlets, news organizations, websites, I very often can’t share that with other researchers. Those who are on my team can also work with that data, but copyright rules and regulations prevent us from sharing it with other researchers outside of our team, and so the scientific process winds up being hindered. The sort of questions that we’re investigating are about the spread and impact of disinformation. Understanding the types of political discourse that are happening in a variety of spaces online is really essential to our deeper understanding of both the health and wellness, and on the other hand, the harms that are occurring within our democratic societies.

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Sandra Enimil headshot.

Relying on Fair Use to Reach Intended Audiences

By Sandra Enimil

For Fair Use Week 2022, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) teamed up with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) #MediaWell project and asked experts to weigh in on how fair use supports research, news, and truth. Sandra Enimil, copyright librarian and contracting specialist at Yale University Library and chair of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Research and Scholarly Environment Committee, shares below how fair use helps information reach intended audiences. 

Note: This post was transcribed from a conversation and lightly edited.

When you look at the actual statute about fair use, Section 107 of the Copyright Act, it calls out news reporting by name. It states that it would not be an infringement of copyright to reuse some content in the course of news reporting—it’s specifically called out. So, I think that our legislative branch recognized that people who are in the business of reporting need to be able to use content, sometimes in ways that it was intended to be used, and sometimes in ways that it was not intended to be used, in order to tell stories. Reporters need to be able to tell stories in a way that provides information, in a way that might meet their audience where they are, or have an impact, or be accessible to an audience.

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Sandra Enimil headshot.

Fair Use and the Scholarly Environment

By Sandra Enimil

For Fair Use Week 2022, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) teamed up with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) #MediaWell project and asked experts to weigh in on how fair use supports research, news, and truth. Sandra Enimil, copyright librarian and contracting specialist at Yale University Library and chair of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Research and Scholarly Environment Committee, explains below how the copyright environment affects research and scholarship, and why this matters for society. 

Note: This post was transcribed from a conversation and lightly edited.

I am the chair of ACRL’s Research and Scholarly Environment Committee, and one of the things that we work on is talking about scholarship in academic institutions and how people make scholarship available and open access. In this landscape, I think one of the things that people recognize as important is author copyright. With faculty authors, at most institutions, the institution doesn’t claim copyright in their scholarly works, so the author keeps copyright.

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