Center for Social Media Report on Fair Use in Media Literacy

From Berkman Fellow Lewis Hyde....

The Center for Social Media at American University has just released a report on "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy," a new piece of the ongoing attempt to develop a community-norms based set of best practices in fair use, in this case for all those who teach media literacy.  This is part of a project housed at the Media Education Lab at Temple in Philadelphia and at the Center for Social Media at American University in D.C.  I was involved in the interviewing and the writing phases.

In this project we are following the roadmap used to develop the "Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use."  That project began by researching what was NOT being done in documentary film out of fear of copyright litigation.  Filmmakers were then brought together to decide for  themselves what would be fair practice in a set of typical situations.  From these discussions a code of practice was developed and that, in turn, was vetted by an advisory board of practicing IP lawyers.

In the case of media educators, the report at hand accomplishes the first phase--a description of, as the title says, "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy."

Here is one excerpt from the report:

"More than any other feature of copyright law, fair use recognizes the core speech values enshrined in the First Amendment. In effect, the doctrine creates a kind of situational public domain....  Today, courts’ analyses of fair use issues tend to center on one question: Whether the use in question is “transformative,” in the sense that it adds value to the copyrighted material and employs it for a purpose different from that for which it originally was intended. Transformativeness can involve modifying material or putting material in a new context, or both."

For those who are interested, Peter Jaszi provides a discussion of this transformative analysis here.