What Is "Fair Use" Under Copyright Law?

Let's talk about "fair use" under copyright law, I'm Angela Langlotz, trademark and copyright attorney. I go live here on weekdays to talk trademarks and copyrights, and I'm going to spend the next four minutes talking about fair use. So there seems to be a lot of confusion about what is fair use under the copyright laws. Well, it's best to give an example. Fair use is what is it? It's a defense against an accusation of copyright infringement. So in order to use the fair use defense, there has been some sort of accusation of copyright infringement.

That means you're probably already in trouble. So make sure you get this stuff right. So what is fair use? Fair use is an exception to the rule that copying other people's stuff isn't allowed, OK? It's not allowed even if you give them credit, OK, if you don't have permission, except there is an exception for fair use. Now, fair use... A couple of examples of fair use are things like use for teaching or critique. For example, let's say that you're an English teacher and there is a piece of literature and you want to use a passage from that piece of literature to illustrate something for your students.

And so you take that passage and you paste it into your course materials to illustrate a certain point. That qualifies as fair use. You are using that piece of copied material, granted, to explain or teach something to your students, and you're only using as much as of that passage as you need to to make your point. That is fair use. There's also situations where we are critiquing other people's creative production. For example, let's say that you are a music critic and you want to talk to your audience about a certain passage or a certain piece of this musical composition that you're critiquing.

And so you play a little bit of the musical composition. Maybe it's from a CD or a digital recording. You play a tiny bit of that and then you explain whatever it is that you're critiquing. That is fair use, OK, because you're using just as much of the material as you need to make your point and to critique. Maybe you're saying that it's awesome. Maybe you're saying that it's not awesome. Whatever you're saying, it's OK, because that is fair use.

Let's talk about what fair use is not. Let's say that you have -- you're recording a video and there's some music playing in the background and that music is covered by copyright and it gets taken down because of a copyright complaint. Well, it's properly removed because that is not fair use. Fair use is not well, I'm playing it in the background, but I'm not playing it for whatever nefarious purpose. That doesn't matter. The fact that you're playing somebody else's you're actually performing their work.

That's how we would put it in copyright land. You're actually performing their work without their permission and that is properly removed because of copyright violations. So be careful and watch for these things. When you're using pieces of material that other people have created, you want to be careful not to violate their copyright and steal from them, OK, because that's not allowed under the copyright laws and it doesn't matter whether it has the "circle C" on it. Everybody has the right to their own creation the minute that they create it.

I'm Angela Langlotz. I go live here weekdays to talk trademarks and copyrights. Find me on Facebook, Facebook, dot com forward slash TrademarkDoctor.net. You can find me online at TrademarkDoctor.net and I have a huge video library on YouTube. Just go to YouTube and search TrademarkDoctor. You will find me there.