Fair Use at the New York Academy of Medicine Library | Books, Health and History

"As we go about our work at the library—sharing coloring pages featuring images from our collection, digitizing decades-old journal volumes, pointing people towards resources on the HathiTrust and Medical Heritage Library, among other endeavors—we keep something known as fair use in the back of our minds. It’s a legal doctrine that helps determine when it’s OK to use copyrighted material without explicit permission. This week, Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, the doctrine moves front and center for an annual shout-out by libraries, universities, arts organizations, media groups, and other institutions. It’s a form of consciousness-raising and an opportunity to share examples of fair use in action. Fair use isn’t particularly new—the codification of it in U.S. law is part of the 40-year old Copyright Act of 1976, with the concept of fair use going back even farther. Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, by contrast, is just three years young. It was started by Harvard’s copyright advisor Kyle K. Courtney as a way of spotlighting and sharing the Association of Research Libraries’ Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries.1 Not a scholar or a librarian? Wondering if you really need to know how fair use works? Yes, you do. As a reader of this blog you’re a cultural consumer, but probably a cultural producer as well. We all routinely download, share, and often repurpose photos and videos, songs and TV clips, text, artwork, and sound bites. We create—and recreate—all the time. And we would like our creations to 'reference the world around us without getting [us] into trouble'  with copyright infringement. ..."