Communications scholars often fret over the legal nuances of using copyrighted material in their research, says Pat Aufderheide, a professor of communication at American University and director of its Center for Social Media. Ms. Aufderheide and Peter A. Jaszi, a law professor at American, hope to help researchers rest easy with a new guide to using copyrighted work—like political cartoons or screenshots from online games—in their studies.
Because of the “fair use” provisions of copyright law, copyrighted work can be quoted if it is being used for a purpose different from its original intent, according to the report, which was vetted by a committee of lawyers.
The report, released today, gives communications scholars four types of research-related situations as examples: analyzing copyrighted material, quoting it to illustrate a point, using it to spark discussion, and storing it in a collection. The situations in the report were based on 387 responses to a survey of communications scholars conducted in collaboration with the International Communication Association.
The center’s guides establish what’s acceptable for a field and tell scholars how to apply the law to the cases they encounter, said Ms. Aufderheide.
The center plans to continue producing similar documents for other groups, like an association of research librarians, that want clearer guidelines on using copyrighted works, she added.
2 Responses to Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law
d_fevens - June 24, 2010 at 7:29 am
It would seem to me that with Google & Company (The libraries that supply it with in copyright works) exploiting whole copyrighted works without permission of the owners, that such a guide is redundant.Douglas Fevens,The University of Wisconsin, Google, & Me
darkroomjames - June 27, 2010 at 12:07 am
Darkroomjames June 26, 2010 at 11:45pm Fair Use means to me that we can use materials to more accurately communicate such things as local history where family members or neighbors were directly involved in the nation’s history, for one example. Peter Comstock, steamboat mogul on Lake Champlain during the mid-1800′s, owned the house next to my parents in Port Kent, among other historic dwellings in town. A cousin of my grandmother, Captain Elisha Goodsell, owned a ferry boat company in competition with the Champlain Transportation Company out of Burlington, Vermont– owners of the second steamboat in the world. In the 1930′s Captain Goodsell bought the Oneida, yacht of William Randolph Hearst. The pictures from a website have been used in a ten-copy book on Steamboats of Lake Champlain. I made copies for the historians and a skipper on this side of the Lake Champlain so that the Vermont side, served by the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, could have more images from the New York side of the Lake. The original sources of all the histories and photos are credited, but it takes years for each town to generate an interest in people looking through their own collections to round out the Lake’s entire pictorial history from both states. Rouses Point’s Peg Barcomb was the town historian, now retired and awaiting my darkroom’s finished print survey of her negatives collection which she has jurisdiction over. Anastasia Pratt, Clinton County historian in Plattsburgh, has one steamboats book. Ron Allen, Peru town historian and also for Keeseville, Ausable Chasm, and Port Kent, has a steamboat book. Joan Daby, town of Moriah historian, has a steamboat book. In this way, I hope they and the LCMM and the Lake Champlain Transportation Company can come together to do this history of Lake Champlain more completely and better illustrated than any books out now. Of course “Lake Champlain”, the movie made by Steven Spielberg and Industrial Light and Magic would be the ideal outcome! But I might have ended up offending the authors of the five books and several websites I borrowed from. That’s the nature of “fair use” where actual permission is required. Art Cohn, the LCMM’s Director has a copy of the steamboats book, too. I hoped to provide more accent to his excellent museum and gathered scientific and artistic talent.