Fair use is for students, and artists, and researchers, and …

Last Fair Use Week post!  Today I want to highlight, via a short video, a student project here at Duke that demonstrates really well the kinds of common transformative uses that fair use supports on campus. “Transformative use” has become a major part of the fair use analysis, starting from when Judge Pierre Leval articulated the concept in his 1990 article, Toward a Fair Use Standard.  In 1994, the Supreme Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc. explained:

“The central purpose of this investigation is to see, in Justice Story’s words, whether the new work merely “supersede[s] the objects” of the original creation, or instead adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message; it asks, in other words, whether and to what extent the new work is “transformative.” . . . Such works thus lie at the heart of the fair use doctrine’s guarantee of breathing space within the confines of copyright, and the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use.” (citations omitted)

Changing purpose by adding new “expression, meaning or message” to the works of others represents much of what is done with material in special collections and archives. Those reworkings can come in the form of scholarly commentary, new artistic works, or even class projects.  Below you’ll find a video about an interesting combination of those things.

This project sprung out of a course taught at Duke last semester by Professor Karrie Stewart on Global Narratives of HIV/AIDS. Students in the course were asked to work with the papers of medical anthropologist Maria de Bruyn, a collection held by Duke’sDavid Rubenstein Rare Books & Manuscript Library. Among that collection are materials from conferences which document views (some of which are highly negative) about individuals and groups affected by HIV/AIDS. 

Students, including Ryan Fitzgerald who is in the video, went through those materials and were asked to assess them and comment on them through their own reworkings of the originals. They made copies of the originals and then employed Humumentism,  as laid out by Tom Phillips in his book A Humument, to work over the texts with their own artistic expression to create a new narrative. If you’re interested, you can read more about the class and its collaboration with the Rubenstein Library, the workshop the class held with poet Kelly Swain, or watch the full video of class presentations.  A special thanks especially to Ryan Fitzgerald, Rachel Ingold and Karrie Stewart for help and information for the video. 

Happy fair use week!

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