Copyright Balance and Fair Use in Networked Learning: Lessons from Creators' Codes of Best Practices

Copyright balancing has become a critical issue in the academy as digital practices increasingly have challenged creaky policies and practices. Scholars, academic administrators, librarians, and intellectuals, as well as their students and mentees, need reasonable access to copyrighted culture to research and produce new knowledge. They and their distributors, whether journal publishers or YouTube, need to be able to share work that references and quotes copyrighted material without going through clearance processes never designed for this sector.

Academics have begun to explore their rights under copyright law to quote copyrighted culture, especially under the doctrine of fair use. They have powerful examples: since 2005, several creator groups, including documentary filmmakers, remixers, and media literacy teachers, have developed codes of best practices in fair use. These codes are having a powerful, even game-changing, effect in practice. In this session, the presenters will discuss their collaboration to facilitate the creation of these codes and discuss how this model might apply to the academic environment.