Last Updated on April 19, 2024, 12:42 pm ET
Last week, the library community celebrated the 11th annual Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week! Fair use (in the US) and fair dealing (in Canada) are essential to copyright law, allowing the use of copyrighted materials under certain circumstances without permission from the copyright holder.
Fair Use Week 2024 was an opportunity to highlight how fair use applies to a variety of contexts, from new technologies like generative AI, as well as non-generative applications like text data mining. In a webinar hosted by the Library Copyright Institute and Authors Alliance, experts discussed the legal issues surrounding fair use, AI, and text data mining. Watch a recording of the webinar.
Harvard Library launched a new Fair Use Week page and hosted a series of blog posts from the balanced copyright and research library community on topics like AI, nonconsumptive fair use cases, and the 30th anniversary of the Pretty Woman case. The decade of previous Fair Use Week posts are still on the archived site https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/copyrightosc/.
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) hosted a panel discussion about the Canadian Codes of Best Practice in Fair Dealing for Software Preservation, Open Educational Resources, and Crown Copyright. The codes provide Canadian legislative and legal context to common situations that practitioners encounter in their work where copyright and fair dealing are relevant, and establish judicious best practices in the application of fair dealing to specific activities. The codes are intended to encourage an interpretation of fair dealing consistent with that of the Supreme Court of Canada, which confirmed that fair dealing is a users’ right that should be given a large and liberal interpretation. To learn more about fair dealing in Canada, visit Fair Dealing Works.
Also this week, Sara Benson, Copyright Librarian and Associate Professor, Scholarly Communication and Publishing at the University of Illinois Library hosted a Fair Use Week Game Show featuring Fair Use Week founders Sandra Enimil, Pia Hunter, and Kyle Courtney. To see what else you might have missed—or to revisit your favorite events—check out FairUseWeek.org. Feel free to repurpose some of the perennial resources, like the Q&A with Columbia University Libraries Director of Copyright Advisory Services Rina Pantalony, or Find Yourself in Copyright: A Fair Use Week Webinar with the US Copyright Office.
Don’t miss next year’s Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week: February 24–28, 2025!
