Berkman Luncheon Series: Lewis Hyde on Reclaiming Fair Use for Scholars and Teachers”

Berkman Fellow and Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College Lewis Hyde today gave a Tuesday Luncheon Series presentation on "Reclaiming Fair Use for Scholars and Teachers."

“Fair use” is a legal doctrine creating what has been called a “situational public domain” within the exclusive rights that copyright gives to content owners. Fair use rights have turned out to be hard to exercise in practice, however, partly because the fair use statute is vaguely worded and partly because specific guidance has arisen only from narrowly-focused case law.

How might fair use be reclaimed as an expressive right? One answer has been for particular creative communities to articulate their own “best practices” in fair use, to reclaim, that is, the breadth of expression that the statute was intended to allow by clearly stating their own norms regarding the circulation of knowledge.

Lewis'  the history of fair use, describe work now being done on the best practices model, and propose for discussion an “educational fair use project” targeted to teachers and scholars in American higher education.

Lewis' thoughts on similar issues track back to his book, The Gift, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with a re-release. 

If you missed the live discussion earlier, you can catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman.  As well, fellows Ethan Zuckerman and Gene Koo have written about the lunch.