Prompt:

You created a short photo montage that incorporated unauthorized, copyrighted material. Is this illegal or fair use? In this week’s discussion, you will demonstrate that you can correctly apply fair use principles.

Write a short defense of why the copyrighted material you used is fair use, according to the “Best Practices” articles in the Week 9 folder (you’ll notice overlap among the articles). You should be able to cite which category or categories of fair use your video falls under, and how you determined that your use transformed the material and was only as long as it needed to be. This can be in ordinary language, your own thoughts, and without “legal mumbo jumbo.” Please add any additional arguments that you think strengthen your case for your photo montage correctly using fair use.

Response:

Like many of my peers I was mildly shocked when the idea of fair use came up in class with regard to our photo montage project. It was certainly not something I had considered when putting together my montage and to be honest I had not even heard of fair use until this past class. It is an interesting idea that I could see certainly presenting problems in selected circumstances. After all no one likes a copy cat.

I thought our discussion in class was somewhat one sided, most of us have the perspective that no material that provides potential as a learning tool should be off limits. And I would say I completely agree with this idea; I do not understand why anyone would limit others by restricting access to something that encourages learning and stimulates ideas. But at the same time there is something to be said for copyright infringement or piracy, both of which are not only frowned upon but illegal.

Fair use is an interesting policy. It has developed for the protection of teachers and scholarship, in cooperation with protecting the exclusive rights of the individual/company with the copyright.  Copy right infringement is the illegal reproduction or derivation of a copyrighted work. However, fair use covers the use of copy righted material under the premise of teaching, criticism, research, restricted access, or perhaps most interesting: parody.  The use of the media must also pass other requirements in the categories of impact or effect, amount, and nature of material.  This means an individual (other than the one in procession of the copyright) cannot have stolen the media, gain monetarily from the use of the media, or use an inordinate amount of the material.

In going through the fair use checklist, I found that my use of the song “Remember the Name” by Fort Minor was in alignment with fair use. Also in our readings, I found that our use of these songs in our media is most comparable to situation four from Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education: Students use copyright materials in their own academic and creative work.  We all transformed the meaning of our media by using pictures and juxtaposing our music to them. Also we did not gain monetarily from our use of the media, or we did not steal the media for its use in our montages. Now with regard to using the media, it is necessary to include fair use policy does not cover substituting copyrighted media for creative efforts. Students must use the media in an appropriate way that actively transforms the meaning or they are in effect within copyright infringement.

To surmise: by using our works for the purpose of scholarship in a contained academic space (not publishing them to the internet or other public domain), transforming the copyrighted by changing the meaning, and having lawful obtained our media, we have not violated any of the fair use standards.

Comments are closed