Clockwise from top, images from hp-lexicon.org, axanarproductions.com, Amazon.
For students, faculty, and researchers, Fair Use Week (February 20-24) is reason to celebrate: fair use provides an essential safety valve that allows us to use copyrighted works without obtaining permission.
Fair use is a remarkably short and comprehensible piece of copyright law that reflects the need for copyrighted works to be available for all to be used for “purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching… scholarship, or research.”
In celebration of Fair Use Week, the MIT Libraries are hosting two events:
- Innovation, creation, and copyright law: a conversation about legal services for MIT students. Panel discussion: February 21st, 12-1 pm, 56-114. Refreshments provided.
- Fan fiction and fair use: February 22nd, 12-1 pm, 32-124. Refreshments provided. This event will be webcast. Watch here.
Also: Check out these MIT Libraries resources to learn more about copyright and fair use:
- Video of MIT-Harvard panel on fair use in scholarly journal and book publishing from February 23, 2016: The panel explores the barriers and issues that arise when scholarly publishers consider whether to allow fair use as a basis for including third-party material in scholarly articles and books, and considers the implications for authors and the scholarly publishing process.
- Fair use quiz: self-guided quiz explaining fair use and providing various scenarios to assess common fair use cases.
- Fair use & copyright overview: Overview of how to determine the copyright and licensing status of an image or other content, how to apply fair use, where to find “worry-free” images, and how to cite.
- Using images: Copyright and fair use: Identifying images for reuse: A web guide on images and copyright, with links to more resources.
- Reuse of figures, images, and other content in theses: For students working on theses, information on MIT Libraries’ license agreements with publishers that make it possible to reuse figures in your thesis.
- Podcast on fair use: Radio Free Culture #38: a 2015 Fair Use Week podcast interview with Ellen Finnie, head of Scholarly Communications and Collections Strategy at the MIT Libraries. In this episode, RFC host Cheyenne Hohman speaks with Ellen about the four elements of fair use, how to determine if your use is fair, and other issues around the edges of copyright, music, technology.
- A window on fair use: Video on relying on fair use to legally reuse copyrighted content without permission from the copyright holder.