This week is Fair Use and Fair Dealing Week, a time to celebrate, reflect on, and explain these important rights. Authors Alliance is pleased to participate, together with the week’s organizers at the Association of Research Libraries and dozens of other participating organizations.

While fair use rights are also valued by educators, consumers, and technologists, they play a particularly important role for authors. Fair use provides the essential creative freedom to comment on, criticize, build on, and transform others’ works, and helps to ensure that copyright serves rather than hinders free expression.

But, as our own Pamela Samuelson illustrated last year, fair use continues to benefit authors after their works are created, helping preservation efforts by archives and libraries, and enabling new discovery tools that help them reach readers.

While most creators intuitively understand many fair use principles, being familiar with the law is important to fully and properly exercising its rights. Now is the perfect time to brush up, using the information posted at the Fair Use and Fair Dealing Week HQ, or at our own Fair Use FAQ.

And in celebration of these essential rights, we’ll be posting new items exploring different fair use, its importance, and its future throughout the week. Stay tuned!