Peter Jaszi

The ability to make reasonable "fair use" of copyrighted material is both economically and culturally important to the enterprise of education. In asserting fair use, teachers, librarians, and others cannot rely on a claim of "educational exceptionalism," for which there is no clear basis in U.S. Copyright law. Instead, they should seek to take advantage of current trends in copyright caselaw, including the marked trend toward preferring uses that are "transformative," where the amount of content used is appropriate to the transformative purpose. Over twenty years, we have accumulated considerable information about what constitutes "transformativeness," and members of the education community are well-positioned to provide persuasive narratives explaining how educational uses significantly repurpose and add value to the copyrighted content they incorporate. Published in Law & Literature, Vol. 24 No. 3 (Fall 2012).

jaszi-education-and-fair-use.pdf

Discusses copyright and its problems, why librarians need useable fair use, and the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries

fair-use-code-slides-lib.pdf

Discusses why students need to understand fair use, copyright and its problems, how codes of best practices help

fair-use-code-slides-student.pdf

Presented at the 157th ARL Membership Meeting, October 2010.

mm10fall-fairuse.mp3

Presented at the 157th ARL Membership Meeting, October 2010.

mm10fall-butler-jaszi.pdf

issue-brief-streaming-films-2010.pdf

This report summarizes research into the current application of fair use to meet the missions of U.S. academic and research libraries. Sixty-five librarians were interviewed confidentially by telephone for around one hour each. They were asked about their employment of fair use in five key areas of practice: support for teaching and learning, support for scholarship, preservation, exhibition and public outreach, and serving disabled communities.

arl_csm_fairusereport.pdf

Comments of the Digital Future Coalition

dfc-104-comments-16aug01.pdf

At the urging of the United States, a new "digital agenda" recently has been added to the range of issues under consideration in a long-running series of negotiations convened by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Currently, the U.S. is pressing for the early conclusion of international agreements on a number of issues as to which the Congress has yet to legislate and the U.S. copyright community remains deeply divided. In the longer term, this effort to shape global intellectual property policy before achieving domestic consensus could have the unintended consequence of jeopardizing both the U.S. leadership role in the field and the interests of U.S. copyright-related industries and institutions.

summary-intl-ip-2001.pdf