Students, faculty, librarians, journalists, and all users of copyrighted material rely on fair use and fair dealing on a daily basis. Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week is a time the community promotes and discusses the opportunities presented, celebrates successful stories, and explains the doctrine. To learn about fair use and fair dealing, and to see how the community is celebrating in 2023, please visit FairUseWeek.org
Why do libraries care about fair use?
Fair use is a user’s right.
Fair use is the right for anyone to use copyrighted materials under certain circumstances without permission from the copyright holder. Fair use can ensure that the rights of libraries and other users of copyrighted works are protected in the digital environment. For instance, making electronic copies of course reserves available for education is a fair use, as is the use of digital copies to facilitate access for print-disabled persons.
For more on library and user rights, see KnowYourCopyrights.org.
Fair use is flexible and can adapt to new technologies.
Case law in the US holds that ingesting, aggregating, and digitizing works to create a searchable database that only displays snippets of a work is a fair use (Authors Guild v. Google and Authors Guild v. HathiTrust). Researchers can rely on fair use to conduct text- and data-mining research, which involves copying and analyzing large amounts of material that may be under copyright. Ingesting copyrighted works to train machine-learning programs may also be a fair use.
For more on fair use and artificial intelligence, please see “Generative AI and Copyright: An Interview with Jonathan Band.”
Fair use facilitates freedom of speech, expression, and the press.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said that fair use is a built-in free-speech safeguard. Fair use limits the exclusive rights granted to copyright holders, and allows journalists, documentary filmmakers, and the general public to use primary sources even if they are protected by copyright. Often, library collections or journal subscriptions hold the source materials that journalists and others can look to for facts and quotes.
For more on how fair use supports research and journalism, visit the MediaWell website.
About the Library Copyright Alliance
The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) addresses copyright issues that affect libraries and their users to foster global access to and fair use of information for creativity, research, and education. LCA consists of two major library associations—the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries. These two associations collectively represent over 300,000 information professionals and thousands of libraries of all kinds throughout the United States and Canada.
