Creative Commons, OERs and Beyond

This article describes an active-learning exercise intended to help teach copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. In the exercise students use a worksheet to draw original pictures, create derivative pictures on tracing paper, select Creative Commons licenses, and explore commercial usage, fair use, and copyright infringement. Librarian-instructors may find the completed worksheets to be useful aids to supplement copyright lectures; student perspectives will be integral because they are generating the examples used in discussion. Although a scholarly communication librarian developed this exercise to help introduce some basic copyright information to an undergraduate studio art and design class, the exercise can be performed in a general educational setting.

The article provides a guide for the applicable use of fair use by scholastic media. Topics covered include the Creative Commons as a useful body of material available for people who want to comply with conditions creators put on their documents, the relationship between fair use and copyright and the primary goal of the copyright law to create incentives for people to create culture in the U.S. and fair use as the right to use others' copyrighted material without permission or payment.

“Fair use” is a defense to a claim of copyright infringement codified in 17 U.S.C. § 107. Courts have struggled to create uniform interpretations of the law of fair use, and because of this, claims of fair use being unfair abound. Even though interpretations vary, it is important for students to understand and be able to analyze the fair use defense. This critical incident, based upon the case of Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. (804 F.3d 202 [2nd Cir. 2015]), provides an example of its use. A dispute arose when Google, Inc. digitally scanned more than 20 million books under agreements with several major libraries, but without the permissions of the associated copyright holders. Google then established a publicly available search engine making “snippets” (a horizontal segment usually containing about an eighth of a page highlighting the searched term) from the digitized, copyrighted copies available without charge to users. A copyright infringement lawsuit was filed against Google. Google asserted fair use in its defense. In this critical incident, students are asked to draw on the facts and arguments asserted in the suit against Google to both critique the rationales for copyright law and analyze and assess the elements of copyright infringement and the fair use defense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the application of the methodology of analyzing copyright fair use by courts in handling copyright cases. It offers an overview of the history and development of fair use analyses, including the shift toward transformative fair use. Courts are encouraged to balance the fair use factors in accordance with the principles of the Copyright Act of 1976, including the purpose and character of the use and the nature of the copyrighted work.

Information about the three step test that was first enacted in the 1967 revision of the Berne Convention.

Information about the four fair use guidelines.

World Intellectual Property Organization

Cases related to Fair Use.