Vanderbilt Libraries and the Digital Humanities Center are partnering to bring two prominent copyright experts to campus to explore fair use as it applies to research and teaching, particularly with respect to Vanderbilt’s recently revised copyright policy for course management systems.
Melissa Levine, director of the University of Michigan Copyright Office, and Kyle Courtney, founding copyright adviser at Harvard University, will discuss “How Far Fair Use?” from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, in the Central Library Community Room.
The event is free, but registration is required to receive lunch.
Fair use is a powerful exemption to the exclusive rights of copyright holders. Reliance on fair use enables new forms of teaching and research. At scale, projects like Google Books and the HathiTrust depend on fair use to expand access to a wealth of information while exposing it to text analysis and other forms of digital scholarship. In the classroom, educators increasingly encourage their students to create multimodal projects, many of which rely on transformative uses of copyright-protected materials while simultaneously creating new works that have copyrights themselves.
Levine, bringing her extensive experience working with such organizations as the Library of Congress and World Bank, will kick off the event at 11 a.m. with a discussion of current copyright cases and their impact on the educational environment, emphasizing teaching, research and use of library-held materials. Lunch will be provided to registrants at noon.
At 1 p.m., Courtney, a copyright law consultant and Harvard University copyright and intellectual property adviser, will lead the audience through various fair use analyses in the form of an interactive game show. Not to be missed by anyone who has ever contemplated copyright issues, the game show format is an engaging way for participants to learn the processes for making fair use judgements in both their educational and research pursuits.
For more information, visit the Vanderbilt Libraries website.