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Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video

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September 25, 2006 Video Collection

UFVA and Center for Social Media Fair Use Contest Winners

UFVA and The CSM are pleased to announce the winners of the Fair Use Contest. The jury celebrates these films as demonstrating a successful good-faith effort to employ fair use. We were pleased that their makers evidently learned from the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement. We were delighted to note that in some cases, they have boldly and usefully extended the concept.

At the same time, the jury believes that sometimes filmmakers stretched the concept a little too far. The most common problems were:

1) Occasionally quotations use more material than is justified. The amount of material quoted needs to be limited to the transformative need.

2) Sometimes filmmakers may have claimed fair use when they were simply using it as b-roll or to establish a straightforward factual point (for instance, Adolph Zukor looked like this). Such uses don’t transform the original material by repurposing it (the original photograph was taken to document the appearance of Zukor).

3) Occasionally, filmmakers used a quotation as an aesthetic trope or motif, and that may in some cases be justifiable fair use. But it is not an issue that documentary filmmakers dealt with in the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement, and therefore not something we can judge.

Finally, it wasn’t always easy for us to understand what precisely had been fair-used these films, without a “rights bible” for each film. (A”rights bible” is an essential tool for a filmmaker seeking distribution, of course.) In some cases, filmmakers did not include references to fair-used material in their credits. Drawing upon etiquette as much as on law, we encourage filmmakers who employ fair use also to identify their sources as well.

We herald the courage, insight and wit of these filmmakers. We also encourage them to take a second look at their work and if appropriate tweak in the problem areas we signaled before attempting to distribute this work commercially.

For examples of fair use employed successfully in a commercial and broadcast context without dispute, go to centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse or see the examples on the DVD, Fair Use Toolkit.

Critical Media

UFVA and CSM Fair Use and Free Speech Contest Winner! Grand Prize winner of Faculty/ Student Collaboration $1500 + a one year free membership to UFVA by Bettina Fabos and students from Miami University