August 2011. In each conversation, participants were asked to discuss a series of brief hypothetical examples designed to raise questions about fair use and its limitations. Conversations revealed that members of this community understand that their mission depends on copyright, both the protection it provides for those who have already produced knowledge and the important rights it creates for those who need access to copyrighted material to enable learning, scholarship, and creativity. Their understanding of fair use, represented below, is grounded in this understanding of copyright balance. To ensure that the applications of fair use represented by the principles fall within the bounds of reason, an outside panel of distinguished copyright experts reviewed this document.
However, this document is not intended and should not be construed as representing their legal advice. With this information in hand, each institution can undertake its own legal and risk analysis in light of its own specific facts and circumstances.
WHAT THIS IS
This is a code of best practices in fair use devised specifically by and for the academic and research library community. It enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself.
It identifies eight situations that represent the library community’s current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials and describes a carefully derived consensus within the library community about how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations. These are the issues around which a clear consensus emerged over more than a year of discussions. The groups also talked about other issues; on some, there seemed not to be a consensus, and group members found others to be less urgent. The community may wish to revisit this process in the future to deliberate on emerging and evolving issues and uses.
WHAT THIS ISN’T
This code of best practices was not negotiated with rights holders. This code is the work of the academic and research library community and arises from that community’s values and mission. It presents a clear and conscientious articulation of the values of that community, not a compromise between those values and the competing interests of other parties.
