New ARL Best Practices in Fair Use
Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Berkeley School of Law, California Digital Library, and the School of Information.
What is fair use, and how can libraries use their fair use rights to better accomplish their missions, from preservation to support for scholarship and teaching to digitizing collections for public access? A ground-breaking new document, the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, provides powerful new insights into the ways librarians can apply fair use principles to resolve central and recurring copyright challenges.
Brandon Butler of the Association of Research Libraries and Peter Jaszi of American University Law School, co-facilitators of the code, will introduce this new document at this event. They will provide an overview of its contents and discuss policies and scenarios to help librarians and library staff determine how its principles can help them solve local challenges and improve local policies dealing with copyright and fair use.
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and based on two years of research into the core challenges that libraries face and the considered opinions of librarians from across the country on how best to solve them using fair use, this new code gives librarians tools to help reason through challenging copyright issues. The code, along with supporting materials, can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.arl.org/fairuse beginning January 26th, and hard copies will be available for free at the event as well.
The session is open to all librarians, library staff, and champions of fair use. Admission is free; registration is not required.
Brandon Butler is the director of public policy initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), a group of 126 major academic and research libraries in North America. His responsibilities include analysis and advocacy regarding copyright, privacy and surveillance, free expression, and telecommunications. He also writes the ARL Policy Notes blog and the @ARLpolicy Twitter feed. He earned bachelor’s degrees in English and philosophy from the University of Georgia, a master’s in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, and his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. Before working at ARL, he was an associate in the media and information technologies practice at the law firm Dow Lohnes PLLC in Washington, DC.
Peter Jaszi teaches domestic and international copyright law, directs the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, and writes about copyright history and theory. With Craig Joyce, Marshall Leaffer, and Tyler Ochoa, he co-authored the standard copyright textbook Copyright Law (Lexis, eighth edition, 2010). In 1994 he was a member of the Librarian of Congress’s Advisory Commission on Copyright Registration and Deposit, and in 1995 he was an organizer of the Digital Future Coalition. He is a trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA and a member of the editorial board of its journal. Since 2005 he has been working with Professor Patricia Aufderheide of the American University’s Center for Social Media on projects designed to promote the understanding of fair use by documentary filmmakers and other creators; their book, Reclaiming Fair Use, was published this year. In 2007 he received the American Library Association’s L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award, and in 2009 the Intellectual Property Section of the District of Columbia Bar honored him as the year’s Champion of Intellectual Property.
