It has been a long time since I read these ten myths of copyright by Brad Templeton. Here’s what he says about Fair Use (seems relevant to the Sonia Zjawinski kerfluffle, and follow-up)
My posting was just fair use!”
See EFF notes on fair use and links from it for a detailed answer, but bear the following in mind:
The “fair use” exemption to (U.S.) copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That’s vital so that copyright law doesn’t block your freedom to express your own works — only the ability to appropriate other people’s. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. Are you reproducing an article from the New York Times because you needed to in order to criticise the quality of the New York Times, or because you couldn’t find time to write your own story, or didn’t want your readers to have to register at the New York Times web site? The first is probably fair use, the others probably aren’t.These rules apply to content you pull from the internet as well. If you wanted to criticise the poker strategy advice on pokerlistings.com, you could reproduce sections of that advice in your criticism as fair use. Just copying it to make your own poker site would probably be plain old copyright infringement.
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Fair use is generally a short excerpt and almost always attributed. (One should not use much more of the work than is needed to make the commentary.) It should not harm the commercial value of the work — in the sense of people no longer needing to buy it (which is another reason why reproduction of the entire work is a problem.) Famously, copying just 300 words from Gerald Ford’s 200,000 word memoir for a magazine article was ruled as not fair use, in spite of it being very newsworthy, because it was the most important 300 words — why he pardoned Nixon.Note that most inclusion of text in followups and replies is for commentary, and it doesn’t damage the commercial value of the original posting (if it has any) and as such it is almost surely fair use. Fair use isn’t an exact doctrine, though. The court decides if the right to comment overrides the copyright on an individual basis in each case. There have been cases that go beyond the bounds of what I say above, but in general they don’t apply to the typical net misclaim of fair use.
The “fair use” concept varies from country to country, and has different names (such as “fair dealing” in Canada) and other limitations outside the USA.
Facts and ideas can’t be copyrighted, but their expression and structure can. You can always write the facts in your own words though
See the DMCA alert for recent changes in the law.
I still think Fair Use doctrine is woefully fuzzy in re: photography. Marie Carnes posits a very interesting scenario in a comment, namely what happens when an artist is separated from income from their work by someone using Fair Use to separate the artist from the work? The original artist would still seem to have copyright over their original image, but might never know about it. She says it much clearer, check it out.
Most of the Fair Use examples I have seen deal with text, a few with music, but I haven’t seen a clear, cogent argument about photography reproduction, despite reading many interesting comments, such as the one one this Flickr post. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough – are there any examples of Fair Use of a photograph you are familiar with?