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Fair Use

In Chapter 13 the authors discuss copyright and what it protects. The section that this blog post will focus on is fair use. In 1976 Congress adopted the Copyright Act of 1976 and in it they outlined their fair use policy. Fair use states that it is acceptable to use copyrighted materials without permission as long as the use meets four guidelines. The four guidelines are the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole and the effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (Tedford and Herbeck 366).

The most notable example in pop culture that I can think of that utilizes the fair use policy frequently is YouTube. When music first started showing up on YouTube a lot of the songs were getting taken down for copyright infringement. The owners of YouTube channels in the description of the songs posted the fair use policy and claimed that is was for educational or criticism of the music. Most of the songs were allowed to stay up when they had that disclaimer. I always found that interesting to me because it was clear that they weren't using it for educational or criticism uses but the posters were just using the fair use policy as a way to post the songs for free.

Sources:
Tedford, Thomas L., and Dale A. Herbeck. Freedom of Speech in the United States. 8th ed., Strata
Publishing, Inc., 2017.

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