The Thin and Confusing Line between Copyright and Fair Use
“Most people will tell you that if your quote is less than 10% of the work, and either less than a full book chapter or less than 30 seconds of audio/video, you’re good.“
Although copyright and fair use can be difficult to understand, it is important for students and educators to learn. Copyright teaches students how to respect another person’s work and utilize resources in the best way possible (such as deciding whether or not to show just a few seconds of a video or the whole thing in order to get a point across). Even if someone only uses a few seconds of a video or a quote from a book, it is still important to give credit either through a citation, naming the creator, or providing a link to the full source.
“The Copyright Act gives all authors a set of rights that only they may exercise. These include the right to make copies, to prepare derivative works, to publicly distribute, display and perform the work…”
Are copyrighted sources better or more credible than non-copyrighted sources? The word copyright carries a certain amount of weight. If something is copyrighted, people might be more likely to trust the source since the creator had to go through the process to get the copyright recognized and approved. In most cases, a published book with copyright might be more credible than a blog post that’s public domain, but if the public domain blog post is more factually accurate, would it be recognized as a credible source? Perhaps it all depends on the person/researcher, but even if a source is copyrighted, it is still important to analyze the source critically before using it.
“A creator’s rights persist for their entire lifetime, plus 70 more years. After that, works become part of the public domain.“
Even though a work might become part of the public domain, it may still be protected by other laws or organizations. I wish the author had elaborated a bit more about how the public domain operates, other laws that might affect the public domain, and/or how public domain affects popular media. One example is Sherlock Holmes. Although all of the Sherlock Holmes stories are in public domain now, in 2021 the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate tried to sue Netflix over how a movie portrayed Sherlock Holmes. They used the remaining ten stories protected under their copyright to prove that Netflix violated copyright. Eventually, the case was dismissed, but it shows how complicated and gray copyright can get, especially when an organization or creator tries to protect the original work.
