“The copyright law allows us as students and educators some wiggle room for scholarly use.” — Carl Johnson
Most people who know me well know that I'm no friend of copyright. Some people talk about how its purpose is to help authors and other creators, but I find that it's just a state entitlement to major media corporations that allows them to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense. As someone who works in education, I'm particularly incensed whenever people dance around the idea that they need to avoid using anything that's copyrighted, even for educational purposes. It turns out that's not true, as there's a legal principle called fair use that says it's okay to use copyrighted materials for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.
So it won't surprise you that I found it very good news that last week an appellate court ruling upheld a decision that was very friendly to the idea of fair use. As reported by Thomas O'Toole over in BNA's E-Commerce and Tech Law Blog, the case revolves around TurnItIn.com, a plagiarism detection service that adds copies of all the student papers it evaluates into a huge database, thereby always increasing the number of existing examples against which to compare new submissions. The upheld ruling was that TurnItIn wasn't impermissively infringing copyright even though their use of the materials was commercial in nature, was indirectly transformative in purpose rather than directly modifying the work, and even though they used the works in their entirely rather than just a part of the work. This is a surprisingly broad interpretation of fair use, and while some might be a little put off by the way TurnItIn does business (myself included), for fair use for education to be reaffirmed in such a broad manner is a rare pleasure.
So next time you see one of your instructors Xeroxing a set of handouts for class from a copyrighted source, don't worry, they're simply taking advantage of fair use of that material. And if you're a student or educator who's interested in learning more about fair use and similar issues, you may want to check out Students for Free Culture. It may seem like a complicated subject, as most legal things do, but your freedom is at stake!
Next up, I look at what's coming next semester.