Copyright, Fair Use and Education in the Digital Age
This week, I reviewed Kenneth D. Crews’ “Fair-Use: Overview and Meaning for Higher Education” (last update: 2000) and a Q&A with Peter Lyman published in Educom Review, titled “Copyright and Fair Use in the Digital Age” (1995). These articles were helpful to me in moving this study closer towards the domain in which it’s ultimately concerned. That is understanding when, how and why networked technologies create tension between copyright holders and those interested in using the intellectual property of others for teaching and learning in the digital age.
Crews reiterates the fact that “the law provides no clear and direct answers about the scope of fair use and its meaning in specific situations.” The Four Factors are instead meant as guidelines for determining whether or not a use is considered to be fair use (as mentioned earlier). He goes on to say that it’s important to “keep in mind that fair use requires weighing and balancing all four factors before reaching a conclusion,” which he breaks down as the purpose, nature, amount, and effect of the use in its analysis.
As I was reading this article, I began to consider these factors within the context of participatory platforms. More specifically, I thought about the meaning of “transformative” use and what happens when a copyrighted work is re-published on the web in a space where it’s being responded to, and ideas are added to it, by a wider audience. Does the use of the platform, and its potential value added by contributors, make the use of the original work transformative? Do we need a new framework for measuring fair use perhaps based on the degree to which people add knowledge to a copyrighted work through commons-based peer production?
