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I have read several blog posts lately about Fair Use. Fair Use refers to the use of verbiage, copy, video, music, whatever, without having to ask for the owner’s permission. I think this is an important issue for blog owners, site owners and web users in general.

Wikipedia describes Fair Use as the following: Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor balancing test. The term fair use originated in the United States.

More times than I care to remember we have come across copy on the web taken directly from our site, without permission. Often folks have just copy and pasted our verbiage right onto their site – basically plagiarism. This is an obvious case where people are not employing the fair use practice, but it’s a little bit hard to define. What does fair use really entail?

I think for practical, everyday purposes, such as blog posts, and other social media applications, a simple acknowledgment of where a piece of copy originated is sufficient. For example, I often just mention where I saw an article, idea or piece of news. If I think the original content is really worth a read, I will quite often post a link in the blog post, or at the end. I think this more than makes clear where I got the information, and I think it is appropriate. (Check out my Wikipedia quote above)

If, however, you are writing copy for a website, not a blog, I think any use of others’ verbiage or other created material needs to be clearly cited. This must be done carefully, such as in the MLA or APA style, depending on the type of site. Using quotes from another site is flattering, and can provide a useful link back to the original site, but I think that most of the time original content is the way to go. There are obviously circumstances where it is appropriate, such as academic or political or some such, but if you have an e-commerce site, you really need to create your own content. Just my two cents…

So, what does fair use mean to you? Do you use other people’s copy in other ways than I have described? What is your method of documentation? Do you just mention the original source, or do you provide a link?

For more discussion:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/06/10/what-is-fair-use-you-tell-us
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Copy Writing, General, social media, Web news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.