The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind forg'd manacles I hear

William Blake, London (and the Introduction to Fair Use Reclaimed)

In about three weeks, I will be giving a presentation to the faculty about fair use and copyright. It will be based on the book Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi.

It includes The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education.

I think the Code of Best Practices is one of the most important documents for educators and school librarians to come out in a very long time. It takes copyright from a place of fear and puts it back to a reasonable, fair use. And through the Code, it gives us a foundation to practice fair use, which is from which we get our our rights as educators and librarians. Legal scholar Kenneth Crews has an journal article ("The Law of Fair Use and the Illusion of Fair-Use Guidelines," The Ohio State Law Journal 62 (2001): 602–700) that is referenced in both the book and the Code and Mr. Crews is interviewed in the video below that is very interesting reading on the classroom guidelines many of may have been following for years. We can now throw those out and use the Code.

The Center for Media Studies uses blip.tv for their downloadable videos, which is not very user friendly. I've reformatted it to youtube for those of you who need that format (say for a blog or prezi). The video is great.



I'm creating a prezi for this presentation to my faculty and I will post it when it is complete.

The Code is brief. I recommend you read it. Trying to give a synopsis, I think, would only confuse a concise and to the point document.