Like so many good holidays, one of the main goals of Fair Use Week is to draw your attention to something important that you might have lost track of in the rush of everyday life. Fair Use Week reminds us that the stakeholders in copyright policy are much broader than just copyright holders, and that fair use is an important right that protects First Amendment values and gives American creators and innovators a competitive edge in both culture and technology. What would it look like to take those insights into the rest of your year? Here are a few suggestions for folks from different parts of the law/policy/creativity universe to keep the Fair Use Week spirit alive year-round:
- For legislators and Congressional staff: When you consider new legislation related to copyright, consider its impact on scholars, critics, librarians, technologists, journalists, and others who rely on fair use every day. Recognize that bigger, stronger, longer copyrights and more, faster, easier copyright enforcement, whether through takedown notices, siteblocking orders, or other measures, will inevitably hurt fair users as well as infringers.
- For journalists: Talk to folks who can help you understand how breaking news, whether it’s a new lawsuit, a new judicial opinion, a proposed law, or the introduction of a new technology, will impact fair use. Avoid misleading property rhetoric, like using “theft” to describe copying, that effectively erases fair use from the copyright system.
- For creators: remember that fair use is your right, too, and it’s worth defending just as stridently as you defend your copyrights. The fair use principle that permits a journalist to quote from a copyrighted book as part of her review is the same principle that permits an AI developer to train a large language model on news content, among other materials. If you abandon fair use to block the disruptions and dislocations of AI, you may soon find it is no longer there when you need it for your own work.
I hope you’ll join me in keeping Fair Use in your heart year-round.