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Fair Use
Important: This article contains opinions and information about copyright
law. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer and have not been a lawyer in any
past life that I am aware of. If you have specific questions about copyright
law you should contact the appropriate legal resources.
Think about it for a minute. If no on could ever make a copy of anything
without the copyright owner's permission, then commentary, critical
articles, news reporting, research papers and education would be much more
difficult. It would be much more difficult, for example, to write a book
report without including a quote or two from the author. It would be even
more difficult to write a thesis, term paper or research article without
including quotes from dozens or even hundreds of sources.
Let's say you were writing an article on copyright and you needed to
illustrate a point. You could write your own words (and you should), but you
would have a much more powerful article if you included some quotes from
reputable sources. It makes it appear that you have done your research and
gives you additional authority that you might not otherwise be granted.
In fact, it would be downright silly to require people to get permission to
make quotes of this nature. Imagine how difficult it would be if you were
writing a term paper which included references from a hundred difficult
sources. You would have to track down each author and ask permission. Many
times the author has given up the copyright to some other entity, so you
would have to do further research on who really owns the copyrights. This
could conceivably require more time than writing the paper itself!
PlottingPlotting How do you plot a novel' You read your favorite book and the writer put the twists and turns in just the right places. ..... To enable you to include quotes of other author's works, an exemption to the
United States copyright law was created. This allows for "commentary,
parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works
without the permission of the author (from "10 Big Myths about copyright
explained", just to illustrate how this works).
So how does this work? Well, some of the more important considerations are:
- Your intent in copying the work
Fair UseImportant: This article contains opinions and information about copyright law. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer and have not ..... - How much of the work was copied
- As well as any damage to the commercial value of the work.
So, for example, if you were writing an article about the quality of the
movie "The Mummy Returns", you could use brief quotes from the film to
illustrate your point. However, if you included the entire script on your
web site, well, that would be a copyright violation.
In general, it is a good idea to include a reference to the original source
material. This serves many purposes, one of the most important being simple
common courtesy (in fact, I often like to let the author know I have
borrowed some of his words). It also makes it clear that you have invoked
fair use, and it gives your readers a source for additional information.
Just as i
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