Guest post by Founding Member Michael Madison For a week about fair use, let me make fair use about authorship, and the shared goals of copyright, and in a very specific way. First, some background: I first wrote at length about the purposes and law of fair use in a long paper published in 2004, […]
Authors Alliance Co-Founder Pamela Samuelson Authors and artists rely on copyright’s doctrine of fair use far more than they may realize. February 23-28 is Fair Use Week this year, so it’s a good time to think about when and why fair uses benefit authors. (Fair uses of copyrighted works are not infringements; here’s a link […]
Authors Alliance Co-Founder Molly Van Houweling In honor of fair use week, we’re taking a look back The Ecstasy of Influence, by award-winning author Jonathan Lethem. (Read more about Lethem’s work in this recent review.) Lethem, who serves on the Authors Alliance Advisory Board, does not mention fair use in his 2007 essay (which is […]
Authors Alliance Co-Founder Pamela Samuelson Having read several of Ian Fleming’s books as a youngster and seen virtually every James Bond movie, I have long been intrigued by the question: what is the essence of James Bond as a character? 007, yes. Shaken, not stirred, for sure. Handsome in a tuxedo or a swimsuit, yes, […]
Last fall, Authors Alliance began the process of petitioning for an exemption to the law that prohibits the circumvention of DRM in order to facilitate the fair use of copyrighted content in multimedia ebooks. We are pleased to announce that the next step in the process of obtaining the exemption is complete. Working with counsel […]
Multimedia ebooks are still in their early days, but they present new opportunities for authors to express their ideas, creativity, and scholarship. As UC Press’s Alison Mudditt said at the recent Authors Alliance panel at Harvard, “there are an increasing number of faculty who are doing research that cannot be reproduced purely in print form.” […]
Kevin Smith, Duke University’s Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communication and an Authors Alliance founding member, has just published a handbook on copyright and related issues for teachers and researchers that will be a useful resource for many Authors Alliance members. Kevin introduces the book, its approach, and his motivations below. The idea that I […]
The Center for Media and Social Impact releases “Best Practices” guides designed to help communities of creators and specialists in how U.S. copyright’s “fair use” doctrine applies to uses typical in a given community. Guides exist for diverse fields and communities, including documentary filmmaking, open courseware, poetry, and for academic libraries.
Guest post by Founding Member David Hansen Today we celebrate a new tool that will make it easier for libraries and archives to apply the important copyright doctrine of fair use to their collections containing orphan works, especially as they put those works online. I, along with research teams at American University and UC Berkeley, […]
Pam Samuelson & Mike Wolfe At Authors Alliance we keep a close eye on what’s going on in fair use litigations that could have lasting effects on authors whose primary goal is create and disseminate their works with the purpose of advancing knowledge. We are not the only ones, of course, who are monitoring developments […]
