On Fair Use: Can Dateline NBC Just Run Your YouTube Clip Without Permission?
The law doesn’t set out hard and fast rules about how much copyrighted material one can use without crossing the line between fair use and copyright infringement. If a news story quotes a sentence or two from a book that is relevant to the topic of the story, the author of the book would likely have a hard time saying this isn’t fair use. But if that excerpted text grows into multiple paragraphs, it becomes more and more difficult to claim fair use.
Perhaps the easiest way to talk about fair use isn’t in the abstract, but through examples.
Let’s start with the premise of a YouTube user who posted a video about how to build a dining room table.
Example 1:
A news program does a story on “How to Build a Table” and uses the YouTube clip in its entirety with no critical response or editorial addition to the content of the clip. This would be difficult to defend as fair use as there is nothing transformative about the way in which it was presented.
Michael Sauers is the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
The law doesn’t set out hard and fast rules about how much copyrighted material one can use without crossing the line between fair use and copyright infringement. If a news story quotes a sentence or two from a book that is relevant to the topic of the story, the author of the book would likely have a hard time saying this isn’t fair use. But if that excerpted text grows into multiple paragraphs, it becomes more and more difficult to claim fair use.
