American University's Center for Social Media, in collaboration with Washington College of Law's Program
on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and the Stanford University Law School Fair Use Project, recently launched a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law.
The video, titled Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend, is a companion piece to the
Center's Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, released last summer under the leadership of American University professors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi.
"This video lets people know about the code, an essential creative tool, in the natural language of online video." said Aufderheide, in a statement. "The code protects this emerging zone from censorship and self-censorship. Creators, online video providers and copyright holders will be able to know when copying is stealing and when it's legal."
Like the code, the video identifies six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. They are:
- Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material
- Use for illustration or example
- Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material
- Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event
- Use to launch a discussion
- Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works
For instance, a blogger's critique of mainstream news is commentary. The fat cat sitting on the couch watching television is an example of incidental capture of copyrighted material. Many variations on the popular online video "Dramatic Chipmunk" may be considered fair use, because they recombine existing work to create new meaning.
"The fair use doctrine is every bit as relevant in the digital domain as it has been for almost two centuries in the print environment," said Jaszi, founder of AU's Program for Information, Justice, and Intellectual Property and a Professor of Law in AU's Washington College of Law. "Here we see again the strong connection between the fair use principle in copyright and the guarantee of freedom of speech in the Constitution."
RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a film from Brett Gaylor, has been causing quite a stir about the limits of the fair use frontier since the doc's debut in Montreal last summer. An article in the Spring 09 Documentary looks at the Manifesto and includes insights from Aufderheide as to its premise.