Fair Use

This is the ninth in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on copyright, which provides an overview of this important area of law and offers practical advice to citizen media creators on how to use the copyrighted works of others and protect their own work from exploitation.

Before we jump into the copyright overview, which is reprinted below, we would like to thank Allan Ryan, who is the Director of Intellectual Property at Harvard Business School Publishing. In addition to writing a large portion of the copyright overview, Allan provided invaluable feedback on the intellectual property sections of the guide and kept us focused on the unique needs of citizen media.

Copyright Overview

A basic understanding of copyright principles is essential for any blogger, researcher, reporter, photographer, or anyone who publishes their creative works. It’s important for two reasons. First, you should understand how you can properly make use of someone else’s work – quoting from it, reprinting it, summarizing it, even satirizing it. And second, you should understand how you can protect your own legal rights in what you create, so that others don’t take unfair (even unlawful) advantage of it.   read more »

Many readers are probably familiar with the meltdown of the Santa Barbara News-Press, a local daily newspaper in Santa Barbara, California. Starting in 2006, reporters and editors of the newspaper clashed with now-infamous Wendy McCaw, controlling shareholder of Ampersand Publishing LLC, which owns the paper. Tensions swirled around McCaw's perceived intervention in editorial and reporting judgments, traditionally left to the paper's professional staff. The controversy resulted in a slew of resignations and firings, chronicled in the documentary film, Citizen McCaw. The brouhaha spurred a bizarre lawsuit over copyright infringement, which pitted the News-Press against another local paper, the Santa Barbara Independent. According to the Independent, the defendant in the lawsuit, the case recently settled. While this might come as a relief to the Independent, it leaves a questionable fair use decision on the books.   read more »

The trial in Rowling v. RDR Books starts today in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The New York Times reports that Rowling herself will take the witness stand. At issue, of course, is whether Steven Vander Ark's print version of the Harry Potter Lexicon website infringes Rowling's copyrights in her enormously popular books. Rowling contends that Mr. Vander Ark's book merely repackages her fictional content, while RDR Books, Mr. Vander Ark's publisher, maintains that his work "provides a significant amount of original analysis and commentary concerning everything from insights into the personality of key characters, relationships among them, the meaning of various historical and literary allusions, as well as internal inconsistencies and mistakes in the novels."   read more »

Derek Bambauer at Info/Law has an excellent post on the Harry Potter Lexicon lawsuit, Rowling v. RDR Books. Bambauer analyzes Rowling's copyright claim and RDR Book's fair use defense and concludes that the celebrity author will likely prevail. While reasonable minds differ on this point (see, e.g., Tim Wu's article in Slate), everyone should be able to appreciate Bambauer's use of figurative language:

An apt description -- it captures colorfully the inherent difficulty in predicting the outcome of a court's fair use analysis. The district judge handling the case has decided to combine the previously scheduled preliminary injunction hearing with a trial on the merits, which is set to begin April 14. We're looking forward to a good meal.

Earlier this month, some of the most creative and entertaining parody videos on the Web were pulled from YouTube over dubious copyright claims. The disputed works, known as the “shred” videos, are a series of parodies in which Finnish media artist Santeri Ojala overdubs performances of legendary guitarists such as Steve Vai, Carlos Santana, and Eric Clapton. Ojala replaces the audio tracks of the guitarists' performances with his own (intentionally) bad guitar playing.

Because Ojala is a skilled guitar player himself, the horrific sounds match closely with the guitar hero's hand and finger movements, which makes the videos that much more surreal. Other rock stars unwary enough to enter the screen during the guitarists' performances get similar treatment – in one notable clip, Ozzy Osbourne's clapping to the beat is reduced to a rhythmless patter that wouldn't have cut it in a backyard birthday celebration, much less a rock show.   read more »

I've blogged before about the Savage v. CAIR lawsuit, in which the conservative talk show host claims that CAIR violated his copyright (and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act!) by posting and commenting critically on an audio clip from one of his shows, in which Savage makes all sorts of hateful and inaccurate claims about Muslims and the Islamic faith. To put it mildly, I disagree with Savage's position in the lawsuit -- it is a blatant attempt to misuse copyright law in order to squelch criticism.

Great news! The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Davis Wright Tremaine LLP are representing CAIR, and they have filed an answer and moved for "judgment on the pleadings," asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit because it is "simply a camouflaged defamation or disparagement claim dressed as bogus copyright and RICO claims . . . Savage's legal broadside specifically targets CAIR as a civil rights organization and its core political speech responding to and criticizing Savage's inflammatory political rhetoric." (from the EFF). The brief arguing in favor of dismissal is excellent. Its introductory argument on the copyright claim is worth reproducing here:   read more »

As a lead up to the launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide later this month, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on various subjects covered in the guide. This post is the second in our series of legal primers. The first addressed the subject of immunity and liability for third-party content under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In this post we discuss copyright and fair use in the context of citizen media.

I. COPYRIGHT PROTECTION AND FAIR USE

A broad array of creative, expressive media are subject to copyright protection, including literature, photographs, music compositions and recordings, films, paintings and sculptures, and news articles – any “original work of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.” 17 U.S.C. § 102. Citizen media creators who use the works of others need to be careful that they do not open themselves to copyright liability when doing so.

Fortunately, there are several circumstances in which the work of others may be used without liability. Bare facts and ideas, government documents, and items in the public domain are not subject to copyright, and some materials may be published under a Creative Commons license or other license that permits reuse. In addition, the doctrine of fair use provides that copyrighted materials may be used without the consent of the original owner in certain situations, such as when using excerpts for criticism or news reporting.
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Chris Soghoian at CNET Blogs published an interesting post yesterday -- Did Slate violate copyright law? It talks about a hilarious mashup video that Slate posted a few days ago called Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick, which juxtaposes images from the 1999 film Election and current footage of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. The mashup plays on the earnestness and ambition shared by Hillary and Reese Witherspoon's character in the movie -- Tracy Flick, a hyper-driven high school student seeking election as class president.

The clip is made up completely of preexisting footage, but it manages to pull off something novel, funny, and politically poignant. As Cynthia Brumfeld writes on IP Democracy:

Nothing in this video is 'original' although the video itself is without a doubt a work of originality and creativity. It also brilliantly makes a political point.

Brumfeld's post is worth reading in its entirety; it uses the Slate mashup to contrast the differing views on fair use held by ubiquitous Columbia law professor Tim Wu and NBC counsel Rick Cotton, as found in the excellent online debate on remixing and fair use published in the New York Bits Blog last week (another must read). I believe, and Wu and Brumfeld would agree, that the Slate mashup is a fair use because it is clearly transformative and it adds value to the original rather than substituting for it.   read more »

Giuseppina D'Agostino, a law professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, has a new paper coming out entitled "Healing Fair Dealing? A Comparative Copyright Analysis of Canadian Fair Dealing to UK Fair Dealing and US Fair Use." Here is the abstract:

As a result of the March 4, 2004 Supreme Court of Canada decision in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada for the first time in Canadian copyright history, the court determined that Canadian law must recognize a "user right" to carry on exceptions generally and fair dealing in particular. This paper compares the Canadian fair dealing legislation and jurisprudence to that of the UK and the US. It is observed that because of CCH, the Canadian common law fair dealing factors are more flexible than those entrenched in the US. For the UK, certain criteria have emerged from the caselaw consonant to Canada's pre-CCH framework and in many ways there is now a hierarchy of factors with market considerations at the fore.

The real differences, however, ultimately lie in the policy preoccupations held by the respective courts, with Canada's top court alone concerned in championing user rights above all other rights. The paper concludes that Canadian fair dealing does not require too much healing but would benefit from some remedies outside (and complimentary to) the law and the courts. While doing nothing does not seem to be the appropriate response, legal intervention as many advocate may not be warranted either. Rather than, or at the very least together with, reforming the law, establishing fair dealing best practices is most promising. The parties directly affected in a specific industry can together develop these guidelines to ultimately aid in clearer and ongoing fairer fair dealing decision-making in the courts. It is here that US initiatives can serve as most fruitful to emulate.

It's nice to see some scholarly attention paid to the differences between the Canadian, U.K., and U.S. approaches to this important subject.

You can download the entire article from the Social Science Research Network.   read more »

Earlier this week, a promotional/inspirational video for the Church of Scientology featuring Tom Cruise began circulating online. The video is bizarre -- against the background of what sounds like the Mission Impossible theme, Cruise extols the virtues of Scientology and urges viewers to embrace its ethics and worldview. Among many, many other things, he drops gems like "We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the authorities on improving conditions" and "We are the way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures."

Some might say that the clip has only gossip value, but others assert that it reveals something about Cruise's position within the controversial organization (which to some may still have only gossip value). Nevetheless, it has caused some complicated legal maneuvering this week. From Gawker:   read more »