If you didn’t catch the first article in this series about copyright laws for teachers, you may want to familiarize yourself with that before continuing. Here, we move past the basics and onto the teacher’s best friend in copyright law--fair use.
You may have heard about fair use in the news lately, since that was the legal issue involved in the recent Harry Potter lawsuit. However, whereas the law is pretty fuzzy when it comes to cases like that where there is a new creative work profiting from material in the original work, it is not quite as complicated when it comes to educational use. Copyright laws for teachers, however, are important matters to understand.
Fair use is part of the Copyright Act, a carve-out that allows for certain uses of copyrighted materials without the copyright owner’s permission. This is what allows scholarship, review, commentary, and criticism of works. You can reproduce something for the purpose of analyzing or criticizing it, and fair use also specifically allows for multiple classroom copies of a work. Fair use is extremely important for culture and scholarship--after all, if it did not exist, then would copyright owners want to give permission for other people to criticize or parody their work? Probably not!
Fair use is considered on a case-by-case basis; if someone sues you for copyright infringement, and the court finds that it was infringement, you can use fair use as a defense. The court then considers these four factors:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantially of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
As you can see, the “nonprofit educational purpose” carve-out is right at the top, and the first factor is usually considered to be the most important.
However, it is important to remember that there are definite lines to be drawn when it comes to fair use. To help you catch when you might be going so far, we will next consider some specific examples. The next article in this series about copyright laws for teachers will cover guidelines for making multiple copies of copyrighted works in the classroom.
