Today — Fair Use Day

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Today is Fair Use Day.  What’s that?  Why a day to celebrate fair use, of course.  What’s fair use?  Well, let’s let the copyright office tell us:

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

Fort example,my using these images from Amazon is fair use because I am using them in the context of a review.

[Update 2011-01-14 07:41:37] I reread the article and realized I posted the wrong snippet.  Oh, and I thought I would say….this article is not an example of fair use.  Why?  Well, everything produced by the US Government or its employees while at work is in the public domain.  That means there is no copyright on it.  And the eff logo?  Well, I’m not commenting on it directly either.  Perhaps it is fair use, but probably not. But, it is licensed under a creative commons license that allows people to reuse it, like I am here.

Image from electronicfrontierfoundation via flickr

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