My understanding of Fair Use comes from years and years of work as a Reserve Technician (job titles, who writes that noise) processing reserves for faculty at a small elite liberal-arts college in an academic library.  Fair Use was my life-blood. A lot of time was spent on educating faculty, and feeling annoyed when librarians would over-ride my use of the four criteria and give the house away. We were processing photocopies when I started and then moved to e-reserves, and then once an administrator I pushed the task back on faculty through their use of Moodle. I encouraged them to link to all the thousands of articles our subscriptions gave them access to linking directly.

As a support staff (read responsible but without power to resist tenured privileges), I relied heavily on the four factors:

• the purpose and character of your use.
• the nature of the copyrighted work.
• the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and.
• the effect of the use upon the potential market.

I focused on the pedagogic aspects of Fair Use, and even when using film, music, data, I felt pretty good about using materials particularly if we could put it behind a password.  And being a residential campus, even the physical copies were usually withing 500 feet of the library so a different beast than some.

I find myself equally perplexed as the teachers in this video as regards student remix and mashup. 

Less so when what students produce is behind a password or displayed from a physical copy.

The Documentary Filmmaker’s Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use is a tremendous tool for getting to the production side of learning.  I particularly like this resource since our aim again is to get to making stuff not just presenting it.

• Fair Use and Best Practices: Surprising Success

Turning to the second part of this to think about my online production and my take on Fair Use, and this mainly focused on our Yawp post. My long running blog site Sisyphean Enterprises and my silly attempt at painting strike me as two possible topics for thinking about Fair Use.

The blog is an 8-year long collection of journal entries, some are workouts, some are rants, and some are archives of online resources. First, why on earth would a teacher or student need that support for pedagogy, but that aside. Fair Use, protects scholarly and pedagogic use, so have at it. The work itself is a journal freely accessible online, so, I have always related to it as if it were in the public domain. While my relation to that work remains the same, my thinking especially as discovering content creators making a living through their YouTube channels has changed. I very much understand their concerns, but as regards the substance of that blog I don’t share the concerns. Regarding the amount of the blog used… personally, if someone were to use 90% of that site for some purpose especially making money), and I discovered it I would laugh at their lack of effort and critical thinking, but I wouldn’t rent a lawyer. If I was monetized on that site, and I gave care that might be a different story, so for me, there is no effect on the potential market.

Regarding the painting, because it is a creative rather than factual artifact it would be harder to justify Fair Use. But because it is rubbish, I am way back at why would any right-minded student or instructor use it for anything (even a negative example). I suppose if some bit of it was cropped and selected for instructional purposes (I suspect a how not to do it) that would be better Fair Use. I gave the original away as a gift so if someone stole that image and attempted to make a profit off of it, again that is just laughable, I cannot even finish the statement.

What if I valued the content I created and was monetizing it to make a living? Then perhaps my tune would change regarding copyright and for-profit use of my content. However, we are talking about Fair Use, and for “factual” content I would be hard pressed to make a meaningful fuss. Moreover, if I discovered that a collection of student videos remixing and mashing my content, I would probably link to it and treat it as free promotion and in turn promote those creators. I might reach out to the teacher and as many of the students as possible and create content on their use of my content.

Perhaps, more complicated is my relationship with my final post in the Digital Storytelling class, Mashup/Remix. The heart of the work is Hemingway’s short story Indian Camp which is in the public domain, and that is why I started with it. I would have to appeal to the transformative use of some of the materials to justify their use and because this is a creative rather than documentary use of materials I don’t have recourse to that justification. My primary use of resources is the embedding of whole videos, on the one hand, a failure of the factors regarding amount used. On the contrary, some of these videos are monetized, and so views pay the creator, as well views count as traffic for the creator, so my use pays them if they are setup for that. I counted on the disruption to the flow of the narrative and the differences between the videos as a creative and storytelling element, so my ripping the videos and editing them into some single video would not have the effect for which I aimed. However, if I had done that I could then get into the niggling about amount, purpose, and nature of the copyrighted work.

I am pretty much rubbish for stuff found on the internet.