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Best Practices in Fair Use come to the research library community

By Georgia Harper

For the last several years, the Center for Social Media at American University (directed by Pat Aufderheide) and the Program for Information Justice at the University law school (with which I'm affiliated) have been worked with various groups of practitioners (documentary filmmakers, media literacy educations, on-line video makers, providers of open courseware, dance archives, and others) to devise so-called Statements or Codes of Best Practices in fair use for those communities. Some information about that effort can be found at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/. Now, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Association of Research Libraries, we'll be part of a team devising fair use standards for institutional collections of print and other media in support of teaching and scholarship. According to the ARL press release (http://www.arl.org/news/pr/mellon-grant-8apr10.shtml): "The project will be undertaken in three phases:

• a research phase, in which the project team will conduct interviews with members of the library and legal communities;
• a development phase, in which the project team, with members of the academic and research library community, will draft and publish the code of best practices; and
• an outreach phase, in which the project team will distribute and publicize the code of best practices."

The theory behind these best practices projects is simple and powerful: When decision-makers (including courts) consider what fair uses of copyrighted material should be permitted because they promote cultural progress, they rely on information about how people actually think and act in the practice communities where the issues arise. So, for example, the "standards and practices" of broadcast journalism are influential in determining when stories can include newsworthy video clips without having to license them. To cite another example, insurance companies that write "errors and omissions" policies for documentary films currently give significant weight to the 2005 Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use." Watch this space for more information about the research libraries best practices project as it becomes available.

Full post as published by ©ollectanea on April 12, 2010 (boomark / email).