Celebrating Fair Use Week: An Interview With Peter Jaszi; Above The Law, March 1, 2018

Krista L. Cox, Above The Law; Celebrating Fair Use Week: An Interview With Peter Jaszi

"Peter Jaszi is a professor emeritus at the American University Washington College of Law and an expert in copyright law and fair use. His distinguished career has included numerous projects designed to promote the understanding of fair use in various communities. He is also the co-author of the book, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back In Copyright, a new edition of which will be published later this year by the University of Chicago Press.

Background

KC: One of the reasons that I love Fair Use Week so much is that it really provides an opportunity to celebrate a doctrine that we actually rely on every day in the digital era, whether people realize it or not. What are a couple of examples of how individuals use fair use in their day to day lives?

PJ: For good or ill, we live these days in a copyright-rich environment, surrounded by (and sometimes bombarded with) information objects that are at least technically within the subject-matter of copyright. In addition, contemporary copyright regulates many of the ways we interact with these objects. Under the circumstances, fair use makes it possible for us to get on with our lives and work without being serial copyright infringers. And while some of our fair use activities are done knowingly, many are not. When most of us clip a few lines from a news story or song lyric and send it to a friend on line, we don’t necessarily think that we’re exercising our fair use rights — but we are! Likewise, an investigative journalist who quotes extensively from the “smoking gun” memo that exposes a business conspiracy may be thinking in terms of press freedom, but it is fair use that animates the general principle. Anyone who dabbles in remix culture is a fair use beneficiary, and those of us who teach and learn in physical or virtual classrooms would be lost without it. Artists in all media rely constantly on fair use — for a current example, consider the powerful final sequence in the 2017 The Florida Project (which was robbed in the Oscar nominations). Fair use undergirds the system by which blind readers receive accessible copies of texts, helping to fulfill the aspirations of the Americas with Disabilities Act. And I could go on. Instead, let me recommend this year’s ARL infographic on the applications of fair use, which tells the story better than I ever could."