Reclaiming Fair Use -- A Book Preview

I picked up Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright from the library this week, to boost my literacy of copyright laws and practices. As someone with some experience and lots of aspiration to create content and share it using digital tools, I want to have a firmer grasp of the stickiness of the issue, and I liked that Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi's book seems to come at the issue from the perspective of "reclaiming" something rather than digging heels into tradition.

Preview

After spending a few minutes browsing the book, I see that the book's scope is usefully narrow. It does not appear to be a history of copyright law in general, but rather a focused look at the fair use clause of copyright law (clause? is that how to think about it? I'll find out!).

In addition, I seem to have been right about the forward-thinking tone and approach of the book. Some of the most interesting-looking chapters have titles like "Why Fair Use Is So Important," "How to Fair Use," "Pioneering Best Practices," and "The Culture of Fear and Doubt, and How to Leave It."

Early Social Proof

I let my social network know that I'm thinking about these things, and was happy to get a response from a friend who is a freelance writer, and who also works at a content and marketing company. She writes:

I have to research copyright every day for my job. We have to be careful in how we use different companies' logos and taglines, and when we write a new one, we have to make sure it's not already copyrighted or trademarked. It's an interesting world. Not many people know that the "Happy Birthday" song is copyrighted song, which is why restaurants can't sing it and come up with their own ditties, and it's why it is rarely used in films-- because it's very expensive to use... I could geek out about copyrights all day.

I especially loved her last line. Geeking out about copyrights sounds even more fun than it did when I started!

Similar Books
I put the book through an Amazon search to see what other books it might hang out with on the shelf, and I found books with titles like Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars; How to Fix Copyright; The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind; and Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. 

That last one, especially, seems like a provocative "other side of the story" to loud faction who support totally open information and media. I'll make a note to check that one out.

I also found the most common "shelves" that Goodreads users put Reclaiming Fair Use in. I found that to be a helpful way to not only finding other similar books but also understanding how people think about and classify this one.

Formal Reviews
I found several reviews of the book using the university library's database. These reviews come from journalism journals, which is understandable although I was expecting more from law journals, which I also found.

David King, a media librarian, describes the book as "a pep talk and how-to manual on exercising fair-use rights" and points out that the book is more interested in empowering people to use the freedoms the law already allows rather than needing to storm the castle of copyright entirely and rewrite everything.

Scholar Judith Fathallah writes:

Not intended for ‘‘bomb-throwers’’ (in effect, those who seriously question the legitimacy of intellectual private property), nor for ‘‘big copyright holders’’ (Introduction, p. ix), this is a book for citizen users who largely accept the legitimacy of media ownership, or at least believe with the authors that immediate efforts to change the system are unrealistic, seeking rather to exercise and strengthen their rights within it.

Fathallah comes from the UK, which must inform her valuable critiqe of the book, that it swings nationalistic in its perspective. After all, Fair Use is an American law, and does not exist in exactly the same way in other countries.

Informal Reviews
Wow, there is a site called FairUseTube.org: Promoting Fair Use in Online Video -- it is no surprise that theirs was the first review of this book! The review was positive and praised the book's history of copyright and (especially) its emphasis that much can be done within the realm of what laws already exist:

The authors argue that copyright reform advocates were far too quick to concede that fair use is too vague and nebulous a concept to be of any real use to those wishing to put copyrighted content to new and transformative uses. Instead, scholars like Lawrence Lessig and others began advocating either for radical changes to the copyright system that are unlikely to ever happen, or for alternatives to traditional copyright such as Creative Commons.

The user reviews on Goodreads also seem very positive. This appears to be a readable, interesting book to a wide variety of people interested in copyright issues.

Other Sources
Classrooms have used this book -- what a useful thing to know, in case I want to reach out to some of the people who have thought the book through. Occidental College teaches a course with the book (And that course also uses clips from 30 Rock, so they have my affection!). As does American University and the University of Pennsylvania. All these courses seem to be focused about new media, copyright, and history.

I also found videos of interviews with the author, one short one (which has been embed-disabled, but can be found here) and this longer one:

First Impressions
By the time I actually sat down to seriously begin reading the book, I already had a sense of what I might find, which helped me read much more effectively.

I am especially taken by the authors' critical examination of the "culture of fear and doubt" surrounding copyrighted material. There is an inspiring story about a parent posting a video of her child dancing to a popular song. Universal, who owned the music, issued a takedown notice, but the parent went to court and won. Fair use advocates want owners like Universal to stop abusing their hedge around the law that keeps content creators from living within the law, out of fear.

I also thought it was nicely put that we are "becoming a nation of makers and sharers" (though that may have traces of the nationalistic critique). As someone who grew up as that really became possible, I didn't really consider the shift inherent in that reality.

I am relieved and eager to learn from this book so far that one does not need to keep a copyright lawyer in your pocket to understand and use the copyright laws effectively. Here's to empowerment and creative fair use!