Thinking Beyond the Four Factors

Every year, libraries and other information professionals recognize Fair Use Week, a week dedicated to educating our communities about the power of Fair Use to help them make informed and responsible decisions about their use of copyrighted materials.

Fair Use week in white text on black background

For example, the University Library at the University of Illinois will be sponsoring a Fair Use Week Game Show, hosted by Copyright Librarian Sara Benson. This event will teach participants about how to conduct a Fair Use analysis in a fun and engaging manner in hopes of getting our campus excited about the possibilities that Fair Use opens.

When considering whether your use of a copyrighted work is a Fair Use, there are 4 main factors to consider: Purpose, Nature, Amount, and Effect.

Purpose refers to your intended use of a work and specifically considers whether you are using it for educational purposes, which is more likely to be considered a fair use, or for profit, which weighs against Fair Use. Nature refers to the work itself. Factual and published works are more likely to be considered a Fair Use than creative or unpublished works.

Amount considers how much of the work you intend to use. Using a small or less important portion of the work is more likely to be a Fair Use, while using the whole work or the “heart” of the work is less likely to be a Fair Use. Lastly, Effect looks at the potential market impact of your use of the work. If it is likely your use would impact the original creator’s ability to profit off their work, your use is less likely to be considered a Fair Use.

In order to make a Fair Use determination, courts weigh each of the four factors holistically to decide whether your use of a copyrighted work is allowed. However, could there be more to a fair use than the four factors used by the courts?

Graphic image of balace scales

“File:Johnny-automatic-scales-of-justice.svg” by johnny_automatic is marked with CC0 1.0

Using another person’s copyrighted material may not just be a legal question, but an ethical one. For example, many libraries make cultural artifacts taken from indigenous people available to the world. As these items get digitized, libraries are typically the copyright owners for the digital version. While doing your Fair Use analysis, it may be worthwhile to also consider whether the community these items were taken from would approve of your use of the material, even if a court would rule that your use is fair.

Another example is the use of personal photos, which the internet makes readily available online. While your use of these photos may be considered a Fair Use after weighing the four factors, is it ethical to include images of other people’s faces in your work without their permission?

Fair Use gives us guidance about how to avoid being sued for copyright infringement and arguments to defend ourselves if we do. But, Fair Use may not always be enough to tell you whether your use is ethical. When in doubt, you can ask your local librarian for tips and resources on using someone else’s copyrighted materials ethically and responsibly.

In the meantime, you can check out the Fair Use page on our Copyright Reference Guide, which contains several resources to help you think through your own Fair Use analysis. Happy Fair Use week!

5 Things for Educators to Know About Copyright Before Posting on Youtube

Making Youtube videos can be a fun and easy way to incorporate new media into a virtual classroom and provide an alternative to live lectures. That being said there are a few copyright concerns to keep in mind before you post. Youtube is a public online space that anyone can access, so the guidelines for copyright compliance are different than if you were in a traditional classroom setting. Read through this post and the recommended resources before you get started. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, it is just some information and resources I’ve come across in my research on this topic.

  1. Youtube WILL take your video down if you use copyrighted content that does not belong to you! Youtube uses software, such as the Copyright Match Tool and Content ID, to detect when content is shared by someone who is not the creator. If your video if flagged by these tools it may be taken down instantly. The process to get a video re-posted is complicated and your account may even be suspended. So, be very careful if you want your videos to stay online!
  2. Youtube does recognize research and teaching as conditions for Fair Use, but only on a case-by-case basis after your video has been flagged. It is best not to use copyrighted content in your videos but if you absolutely MUST, there are some ways you can set yourself up well for a Fair Use case. First, be sure to tag your video with metadata that make it clear this is an educational video. Second, when you make your channel be sure to brand yourself as an educator. For example, if your channel is called something like “Professor Smith’s Political Science Classroom” that is a pretty solid indicator that your channel is educational in nature. Third, only use what is absolutely necessary to your lesson. Don’t post a whole video clip if you are only analyzing 5 seconds of it. Even if you follow all this advice your video may still be taken down so save yourself the trouble and try not to use copyrighted material. If you want to learn more about Fair Use, visit our Library Guide on the subject.
  3. You can easily find images, music, and video clips that have a creative commons license. It is no fun to make a video with no music or images. Fortunately, you can find many of these with a Creative Commons license. A Creative Commons license is when a creator has given permission for their content to be used freely by anyone. One of the best places to find creative commons content are CreativeCommons.org but Youtube even has some creative commons content of their own in the Youtube Audio Library. Be sure to consult these resources before using copyrighted content.
  4. You can give your content a Creative Commons License using the setting on Youtube. If you are open to others using a remixing your content without getting flagged for copyright infringement, you can change your terms of service to allow for this. All Youtube videos are automatically given the standard Youtube License but if you go to the Terms of Service in your account setting this can be changed to a Creative Commons License. That being said, only videos that contain 100% original content can be given this license on the platform. Read the Youtube Terms of Service to learn more.
  5. Are you still not sure if you are violating copyright with your videos? Youtube has a Copyright Troubleshooting feature! Youtube provides a lot of great resources for creators and this one is pretty cool. If you need  more clarification on what is and is not a violation of copyright you can use this Copyright Troubleshooter tool that will take you through a series of multiple choice questions that get to the heart of your issues and provide an answer.

In summary, Youtube is a great place to put your content if you want it to be easily accessible but it is important to respect copyright in the process. For more information you can consult these resources:

The Art Institute of Chicago Launches Public API

Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are a major feature of the web today. Almost every major website has one, including Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Wikipedia, and Netflix. If you Google the name of your favorite website and API, chances are you will find an API for it.

Last week, another institution joined the millions of public APIs available today: The Art Institute of Chicago. While they are not the first museum to release a public API, their blog article announcing the release of the API states that it holds the largest amount of data released to the public through an API from a museum. It is also the first museum API to hold all of their public data in one location, including data about their art collection, every exhibition ever held by the Institute since 1879, blog articles, full publication texts, and more than 1,000 gift shop products.

But what exactly is an API, and why should we be excited that we can now interact with the Art Institute of Chicago in this way? An API is basically a particular way to interact with a software application, usually a website. Normally when you visit a website in a browser, such as wikipedia.org, the browser requests an HTML document in order to render the images, fonts, text, and many other bits of data related to the appearance of the web page. This is a useful way to interact as a human consuming information, but if you wanted to perform some sort of data analysis on the data it would be much more difficult to do it this way. For example, if you wanted to answer even a simple question like “Which US president has the longest Wikipedia article?” it would be time consuming to do it the traditional way of viewing webpages.

Instead, an API allows you or other programs to request just the data from a web server. Using a programming language, you could use the Wikipedia API to request the text of each US President’s Wikipedia page and then simply calculate which text is the longest. API responses usually come in the form of data objects with various attributes. The format of these objects vary between websites.

“A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat, the data for which is now publicly available from the Art Institute of Chicago’s API.

The same is now true for the vast collections of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a human user you can view the web page for the work “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat at this URL:

 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/27992/a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte-1884

If you wanted to get the data for this work through an API to do data analysis though, you could make an API request at this URL:

https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/27992

Notice how both URLs contain “27992”, which is the unique ID for that artwork.

If you open that link in a browser, you will get a bunch of formatted text (if you’re interested, it’s formatted as JSON, a format that is designed to be manipulated by a programming language). If you were to request this data in a program, you could then perform all sorts of analysis on it.

To get an idea of what’s possible with an art museum API, check out this FiveThirtyEight article about the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which includes charts of which countries are most represented at the Met and which artistic mediums are most popular.

It is possible now to ask the same questions about the Art Institute of Chicago’s collections, along with many others, such as “what is the average size of an impressionist painting?” or “which years was surrealist art most popular?” The possibilities are endless.

To get started with their API, check out their documentation. If you’re familiar with Python and possibly python’s data analysis library pandas, you could check out this article about using APIs in python to perform data analysis to start playing with the Art Institute’s API. You may also want to look at our LibGuide about qualitative data analysis to see what you could do with the data once you have it.