In thinking about Professor Galligan’s question about potential copyright infringements in relation to our own blogs (and other fair use issues), I found a wealth of information on the Internet. The most informative cites that I perused were hosted by various law schools (for example, AU had a manual about “best practices” for the use of video content, and the Stanford site was also interesting to explore). In Googling the term, however, there was an important difference between simply typing in "fair use" and "fair use blogs." Similar to our discussions in class, legal precedent is seemingly playing a significant game of catch up in the arena of what governs "fair use" for online content.
The applicable US statute on fair appears here. Nevertheless, and not unlike most legal precedent, I found the legalese to be rather vague and subjective, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. Much of the information contained on the web, however, seems to be in our favor. Stated differently, this "grey area" in the law allows us, at least for creative purposes, to include in our blogs what otherwise would be considered copyrighted. There does seem to be 4 broad areas that we should do a "self-check" on before proceeding and posting:
- What is the purpose of the material we are using?
- What is the nature of the material?
- What is the amount of material we are using?
- What is the ultimate effect of the material?
These factors are summarized with more detail and background information here.
I do have a question for the group, however relative to how to proceed if we do decide to use a video or photo that is not our own. It would seem to me that we should still find a way to cite the unlicensed material or pay homage to the original creator, where possible. For instance, we could include a caption for an unlicensed image, or at least mention somewhere in the text of the blog what the external source is for a particular video clip.
Did anyone else find anything similar or different in their quest?
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