Fair Use Teaching Materials

Fair Use Teaching Tools for Documentary

Fair Use Teaching Tools
The Center for Social Media has created a set of teaching tools for professors who are interested in teaching their students about fair use. The tools include powerpoints with lecture notes, guidelines for in-class discussions and exercises, assignments and grading rubrics. We hope you'll find them useful! 

Fair Use Frequently Asked Questions
Since the release of The Statement of Best Practices we have received many inquires about fair use. Here are some of our more commonly asked items. 

Fair Use Scenarios
Here are four scenarios, or hypothetical situations, that a documentary filmmaker might find him or herself facing. The four scenarios are each linked to one of the Statement's categories. These can be used for classroom discussion, and to inspire you to write other scenarios. The goal of these scenarios is to allow discussion about what the fair and responsible thing to do would be, not to find out "the right answer." These scenarios thus allow students to consider what they think makes sense, in light of the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practice to see what professional filmmakers established as principles and limitations. 

Refrigerator Mothers
In Refrigerator Mothers, about an era when mothers were blamed for their children's autism, J.J. Hanley and David Simpson quoted popular films of the era. In this section, you can see what clips they purchased, which clips they employed fair use for, and their reasonings for each decision.

Fair Use in Documentary Film Discussion Clips
For classroom use - For each video, ask your students to consider the following questions: Why is this video fair use? What specific categories of fair use does the video employ? What arguments can you make for why this video is fair use? For explanations of each video, click here.

Examples of Successful Fair Use in Documentary Film
Filmmakers have been successfully employing fair use, even before the Statement of Best Practices clarified their common understandings. Here are some examples of uncontested choices for fair use. They are organized here according to the principles that filmmakers articulated in the Statement, in the categories used in the Statement. These categories are only four of the most common situations for filmmakers; some uses could be hybrid, and others might fall outside these four categories. We welcome more examples at socialmedia@american.edu

Teaching about Copyright and Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
The Media Education Lab at Temple University has created a whole set of Curriculum Materials for teaching and understanding copyright and fair use. The materials include lesson plans, songs, case studies, and videos. If you're interested in learning more about Fair Use in Media Literacy Education, make sure to check out these excellent materials!Read more...