Copyright and Fair Use

Public Domain

Older works that that are no longer protected by

copyright (being eroded by increasingly long copyright terms…life of creator + 75 years)

Creative Commons

• Works that creators have licensed to be shared (with various restrictions: attribution, noncommerical, share alike, no derivations)

See flickr.com/creativecommons for images and http://search.creativecommons.org/ for all media

Plagiarism

• Using part or all of a work without giving credit to the author / creator (considered academic dishonesty).

• Giving attribution/credit protects you from being charged with plagiarism but is NOT a defense against copyright infringement

Fair Use Considerations

• Purpose of the Use (analysis, parody or critique; transformative vs. derivative; educational vs. commercial)

• Amount of the work (less is better, but no clearly accepted rule)

• Commercial Impact (would the existence of this text reduce the value of the original?)

Radical Fair Use

Center for Social Media attempts to document the existing community standards for fair use of amateur video (wouldn’t necessarily hold up in Court the the “code of best practices” was made by lawyers)

Possible Fair Use DefensesSampling copyrighted material for the purpose

of:• Commenting or critiquing• Providing illustration or example of a cultural

phenomenon• Capturing material incidentally (e.g. song in

background at a party)• Memorializing an event / experience / cultural

phenomenon (e.g. video of concert or speech)

Key fair use defenses

• The remix video radically transforms the sampled content creating something new.

• The remix video could not be a suitable substitute for the original.

• The remix video follows accepted “community standards” on YouTube.