Fair Use for Presentations?

Fubar asks: "The company I work for provides training 'workshops' to various folks in the finance industry. The folks who give the presentations during the workshops are considering adding short clips from various movies to help illustrate their points. In my searching, I have found evidence that basically seems to suggest the practice COULD be either a) fine or b) illegal. Not exactly the black & white answer I was hoping to find."

Comments

I'd ask the companies you want to use stuff from.

[ShyGuy91284]

IANAL either, but I would think since it is under their control, if they really wanted to and had evidence, they could probably nail you for it. What you want doesn't sound like "private use". Many things specifically say "blah blah, not for commercial distribution". Much software says "if this is used in a business, you have to pay, but if it's personal, you don't". So in short, I'd check the disclaimers of the material, and check with the copyright holders if you want to be safe. The chances of them nailing you for it are slim to none, but it sounds like you want to do it 100% legally.

Here's an article to look at

[kaufmanmoore]

look at this article from the intellectual property and technology forum at BC's law school, a few pages down it provides a hypothetical about using a film clip in a training presentation and how it couple be considered fair use. link

Fair use is only a legal defense

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The concept of "fair use" is really only a legal defense in case you are sued/prosecuted for copyright infringement. This effectively means there are no hard and fast rules as to what is OK and what is not OK - it is all subject to interpretation and one person's grey area may be another judge's clear distinction.

Here's the relevant section of the law:

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
   
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
   
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
   
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

As you can see, there is lots of room for interpretation - which, like most of the law, helps to keep the unemployment rate among lawyers very low.

I only know this...

[Seraphim_72]

From the great Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture:

"I've seen the flash of recognition when people get this point, but only a few times. The first was at a conference of federal judges in California. The judges were gathered to discuss the emerging topic of cyber-law. I was asked to be on the panel. Harvey Saferstein, a well-respected lawyer from an L.A. firm, introduced the panel with a video that he and a friend, Robert Fairbank, had produced.

The video was a brilliant collage of film from every period in the twentieth century, all framed around the idea of a 60 Minutes episode. The execution was perfect, down to the sixty-minute stopwatch. The judges loved every minute of it.

When the lights came up, I looked over to my copanelist, David Nimmer, perhaps the leading copyright scholar and practitioner in the nation. He had an astonished look on his face, as he peered across the room of over 250 well-entertained judges.Taking an ominous tone, he began his talk with a question: "Do you know how many federal laws were just violated in this room?""

These are ominous, deep and dark waters that you want to wade through. Get a lawyer, a very good lawyer.

Sera

Theory and practice.

[A beautiful mind]

In theory, you're 100% covered by fair use.

In practice, fair use is an incredibly fuzzy thing. If you can't pay or your company can't pay a team of lawyers to protect your fair use rights against the 800lb gorillas from Hollywood, then you better not do it.

Lawrence Lessig details this issue in his book. Basically, even if it is a cut clear case of fair use, even then it is only clear cut as long as you have the lawyers to back that up. Lessig mentions the case when some documentary filmmaker was filming in a theatre and there was about 4 seconds of Simpsons caught on footage from a tv in the corner of the recorded picture. The guy who made the documentary wanted to clear rights for that 4 seconds, and the company who owns the rights to Simpsons demanded $10,000 (for something theoretically free under fair use). He couldn't even think about just using it anyway based on fair use, because the company he was making the documentary for had insured his production. It ment that lawyers would review the production and they would look for (among others) fair use parts, and if they didn't clear rights for those supposedly fair use parts from the copyright holder, they would most certainly never approve the production, because in their opinion it would carry too much of a risk factor.

So there you have it, theory and practice.