Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure of hearing a featured story on NPR about fair use. Stanford blogger, Anthony Falzone links to the story, so if you missed it, you can listen now: Fair Use Project Profiled on NPR's Morning Edition | Stanford Center for Internet and Society [beta site].
The degree to which copyright and fair use are becoming part of mainstream consciousness is alternately amazing and horrifying. If you teach it, it's fabulous to be able to bring in news pieces, comics, magazine articles, etc. often of great importance, that nicely make your points for you, and that engage your students in the real world of creativity and the law's role in mediating conflicts. But after awhile you may begin to feel that no matter how many people know about it, its vagaries will continue to confound even the most knowledgeable (including lawyers and judges). Is it simply unsuited to the role it's expected to play today? If it is, how long until we figure that out and craft something that better serves our needs?
Comments (2)
It certainly would be possible to have a fair use rule that was absolutely crystal clear and simple to apply, but we would hate it, because it could not possibly account for all of the endlessly creative permutations people have come up with, and anticipate all of the still more endlessly creative permutations they would continue to come up with, in a rational way that everyone could agree on. In other words, it could accomplish certainty only by being arbitrary. If fair use is to serve as the "safety valve" of copyright, it will, unfortunately, have to remain "messy".
That does mean that there will always be an element of risk involved in fair use calculations, but risk is not necessarily a bad thing. When there is risk on both sides, things tend to work out reasonably well somewhere in the middle, although, to be sure, the transaction costs can be high when one side or the other takes an extreme position.
Posted by Steve McDonald | May 8, 2007 5:29 PM
Posted on May 8, 2007 17:29
When placing copyright laws on e-content, the task is vast and complex. The constantly shifting and developing nature of interenet media makes it very tricky to find boundaries and create systems to apply enacted laws. Teachers and professors are perhaps at the forefront of the issue, being forced to seek out content that contains plagiarism for the sake of their grading validity.
Posted by baby girl | May 14, 2007 4:24 AM
Posted on May 14, 2007 04:24