What is the Definition of Fair Use?

Fair use is a provision of United States’ copyright law that outlines the extent to which copyrighted work can be used or reproduced without seeking the permission of the copyright holder.  Generally speaking, fair use is only meant to cover the limited amount of duplication necessary for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.

A more thorough definition can be found in Title 17 of the U.S. Code, Chapter 1, Paragrah 107

Room for Interpretation

As Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonja Sotomayor has repeatedly pointed out during her confirmation hearings, changes in technology and society eventually create contexts that go beyond those that our laws are designed to accommodate.

Online transmission and the emergence of blogging as a form of citizen journalism has certainly transformed the process of creating and duplicating content and it can sometimes be hard to tell what qualifies as fair use in our current context.

Since questions of fair use are of particular import to librarians, the Office of Information Technology Policy at the ALA has published a Fair Use Evaluator.

How it Works

The Fair Use Evaluator asks a series of questions that investigate the purpose of your duplication, the nature of the work being copied, how much of the work you are using, and the factors that might influence how much of an impact your work will have on the worth of the original.

At each stage in this process there is a link labeled “get help in describing this.”  By following these links you are brought to lists of factors that frequently figure in to determining whether or not a work would qualify as fair use.

It is in your best interest to select all the factors which apply from these lists.  Both positive and negative.

When you are done, you can ask the evaluator to create a date stamped PDF that will give you an rough idea of how likely your intended use is to qualify as a copyright infringement assuming the information you provided is correct.

Not Legal Advice

It should be noted that the ALA’s Fair Use Evaluator does not provide legal advice or assistance.  There are specifics in any given act of duplication which, as a general tool, it cannot take into consideration.  For actual legal advice about fair use or copyright infringement, you should always consult with an intellectual property lawyer.

Would You Like to See More Tools Like the Fair Use Evaluator?

Questions of fair use and content duplication tend to drive a fair amount of traffic on our site, but they are not one of MB/I’s focuses.  We therefore need to know if you, our readers, find these tools and resources helpful, or if we should be directing our attention elsewhere.

Please let us know what you think!