I find myself thinking about copyright and fair use more often lately. As our use of technology to disseminate and retrieve information grows, the limits and freedoms of copyright and fair use, very intertwined, become less and less defined.
Georgia Harper’s guest blogger, Carlos Ovalle, writing for the Collecanea blog, has a post titled The Rhetoric of Fair Use. She discusses the lack of definite understanding, even in legal circles, of what fair use actually is. Is it an individual right when using copyrighted material? Is it a defense against charges of infringement? Is it both? What does it mean for it to be either, or both, of these?
She also links to a C|net column by Patrick Ross, Executive Director of Copyright Alliance, titled Fair Use is Not A Consumer Right. Much of his argument, to me at least, seems to be along the lines of “if major league baseball’s copyright statement were enforced, we wouldn’t be able to discuss Barry Bonds around the water cooler”, but since people aren’t charged with infringement for doing so, then things aren’t out of whack.
What do we do? We know that some claimed restrictions are overstated. We know that there is a great deal of copyright infringement, especially on the internet. We even suspect that, in today’s legal climate, that if public libraries didn’t currently exist that it would be a major copyright battle to create an institution dedicated to freely allowing people to borrow copyrighted materials.
We, and this includes me, need to learn more, to better understand what copyright is, and what fair use is. It is one of the best tools we have for learning and sharing what we learn.
We need to teach others how to properly respect copyright, including insisting on and taking advantage of fair use.
Think of it as free speech, but supported by someone else’s creation. This may sound like we are users, but ideas were meant to be shared. That is the only way they can grow into the world-changing paradigms they all have the potential to become.
Take a few minutes and re-watch (or watch for the first time, if you haven’t seen it yet) The Machine is Us/ing Us. Watch for the reference to copyright near the end. Understand that we do need to rethink what copyright means and how we will use it. And then we need to talk about it. Ask questions. Understand that even the really smart copyright lawyers don’t know where all of this will go, or where it should go. Understand that we need to work on this as a group, a very large group.
