Fair Use - Is It Fair? - Page 4

What I don’t get is this: I understand that some of the use may be harsh, but to blame the government doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, some or maybe even all of these are government guidelines but they hardly are there to protect the government, or as one commentator noted and understandaby to some extent, The Man. To me, it seems the guidelines are there to protect people like you and me.

I wrote a piece called What Price Free Content. If you write for free, does that then mean that anyone has the right to take what you have written in whole and publish the entire piece? Syndication may be one issue and if it is used to promote the work in some way, then that is a different beast, but to use the work for again, commercial gain, is really the issue.

I cannot stress the issue of commercial gain enough.

Let’s get to that thorny and relatively new beast, the internet. Here are the guidelines:

Caution in Downloading Material from the Internet

Educators and students are advised to exercise caution in using digital material downloaded from the Internet in producing their own educational multimedia projects, because there is a mix of works protected by copyright and works in the public domain on the network. Access to works on the Internet does not automatically mean that these can be reproduced and reused without permission or royalty payment and, furthermore, some copyrighted works may have been posted to the Internet without authorization of the copyright holder.

Attribution and Acknowledgement

Educators and students are reminded to credit the sources and display the copyright notice © and copyright ownership information if this is shown in the original source, for all works incorporated as part of the educational multimedia projects prepared by educators and students, including those prepared under fair use. Crediting the source must adequately identify the source of the work, giving a full bibliographic description where available (including author, title, publisher, and place and date of publication). The copyright ownership information includes the copyright notice (©, year of first publication and name of the copyright holder).

The credit and copyright notice information may be combined and shown in a separate section of the educational multimedia project (e.g. credit section) except for images incorporated into the project for the uses described in Section 3.2.3. In such cases, the copyright notice and the name of the creator of the image must be incorporated into the image when, and to the extent, such information is reasonably available; credit and copyright notice information is considered "incorporated" if it is attached to the image file and appears on the screen when the image is viewed. In those cases when displaying source credits and copyright ownership information on the screen with the image would be mutually exclusive with an instructional objective (e.g. during examinations in which the source credits and/or copyright information would be relevant to the examination questions), those images may be displayed without such information being simultaneously displayed on the screen. In such cases, this information should be linked to the image in a manner compatible with such instructional objectives.

Today, most work is protected under various Commercial Commons licenses, which means that the author decides how little or how much of his or her work may or may not be used. For example, some work may be used provided there is attribution of some kind. Other work may be used if there is attribution and you are further allowed to alter the work in some kind. Other work may be available for free but with no attribution but in almost all cases, credit is due to the author and the copyright for the original work remains with the author and must be noted as such. You may, depending on the license, use the work in your own piece, but you must give credit where credit is due; depending on how much of the work you have used, you can say the work is collaborative or with 'excerpts from' or 'based on' or any number of ways of phrasing, but you must give the copyright symbol and the author or artist’s (define this broadly) name with the copyright symbol.

Article Author: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a published writer in both the United States and Europe. She is widely known for her music commentary, particularly her writings about Bob Dylan about whom she runs a highly-trafficked site. …

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