Fair Use

This page will hold material about Fair Use (including pointers to subpages).

In his 2000 book for university leaders and stakeholders, Managing Technological Change: Strategies for College and University Leaders, Anthony Bates remarks that "nowhere is there more confusion, misinformation, and paranoia than in discussions of intellectual property and copyright surrounding the development and use of digital materials" (107).

Another outcome has been overwhelming amounts of Fair Use resources, arguments, and materials on Fair Use in educational contexts--both in print and online, and by a wide range of people and institutions who promote distinctly different readings of Section 107 of Copyright Law, Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair Use in which certain noninfringing uses of copyrighted materials may be allowed and protected based on these four factors:

• the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• the nature of the copyrighted work;
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
• the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

An attorney representing, say, the Recording Industry Association of America, a teacher of first-year rhetoric & composition exploring the social construction of legal discourse, and a professor of Computer Science researching the reverse engineering of software may have drastically different understandings of those four factors, their possibilities, their constraints, and their meanings. (See the Pedagogy page for classroom activities and research assignments related to the four factors.)

In educational contexts, those Fair Use factors are supplemented with U.S. Copyright Office guidelines for "Reproductions of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians" (PDF). One reason for contined misunderstagings, ambiguities, and conflicting interpretations of Fair Use in education is that these are, in fact, "guidelines," not law. Recent legislative attempts to "update" or "modernize" both copyright law and educational guidelines have resulted in both the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (1998) and the related Copyright Office Study on Distance Education.

Opportunities for action

Galin, Jeff, Susan Lang, Libby Miles, Michael Moore, Candace Spigelman. "Fair Use Guidelines: Strategies Toward Action." College Compositon and Communication. 51.3 (2000). <Conference on College Composition and Communication, Caucus on Intellectual Property (CCCC-I.P.); Fair Use Action Committee.

Lunsford, Andrea A. and Susan West "Intellectual Property and Composition Studies." CCC 47.3 (1998): 383-411.