Fair Use Week is observed annually during the month of February. For 2024, Fair Use Week will be celebrated from February 26-March 1. What is fair use? Put simply, Fair Use is an exception to copyright laws for educational, journalistic, and research purposes. Copyrighted content can be used for protected purposes without seeking permission or paying the owner. Fair Use protects the user from charges of copyright infringement if the use is appropriate. Celebrating New Additions to Public Domain As of January 1, 2022, a large number of books, music, and sound recordings first published in 1926 have entered the public domain. These include Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne and works by Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Dorothy Parker. This is the first time that sound recordings have been made available in the public domain and an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 are now available. Anyone can now use these works as raw material for their own creations, without fear of a lawsuit. In 2024, Disney’s Mickey Mouse seemed to be coming into the public domain, but it is more complicated than that!
Recommended resources PCC Library has a Copyright Resources guide with an entire section dedicated to Fair Use. This guide contains an overview of fair use, information about the four factors that determine fair use, and many additional resources that are available on this topic. Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law is a personal essay on how copyright laws run afoul in real life. Don’t miss the excellent infographic about how a typical college student encounters Fair Use. Fair Use Week Comics are comics created about Fair Use for Harvard Library. U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index contains definitions and other good information about Fair Use. Quiz: How much do you know about the Fair Use doctrine? Test your knowledge and learn more about the Fair Use Doctrine by taking the University of Colorado Boulder’s interactive quiz, “Is It Fair Use? It Depends!”