February 22-26 is Fair Use Week—people around the world are celebrating fair use, the copyright doctrine that empowers you to make and do valuable things with copyrighted works without seeking permission.

Panel: Fair Use and the Future of Digital Scholarship
Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2-4pm in Alderman 421

As part of the UVA Library’s Fair Use Week celebration, come hear about cutting edge digital humanities research taking place here at UVA and how recent fair use decisions in the courts are opening up new vistas for research. For instance, in 2014, a federal court ruled it was fair use for the HathiTrust to allow digital research using millions of digitized books from research library collections—including thousands of books from UVA.

Brandon Butler

Join Brandon Butler, the Library’s new Director of Information Policy, as he leads a discussion on the most important part of the Copyright Act for libraries and their users: the fair use doctrine.

Special guest speakers include Jonathan Band, a lawyer who represents libraries, technology companies, and others on variety of copyright policy matters, and an expert on the Google Books and HathiTrust cases, and Stephen Downie, Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center, which facilitates digital research on a massive corpus of mostly in-copyright books. Professor Downie is also Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Illinois. Also joining the panel will be Andrew Stauffer, Associate Professor in UVA’s English department and director of NINES and the Book Traces project.

Light refreshments will be served.

Some Fair Use Facts from Brandon Butler:

• Fair use is your right to make use of copyrighted works without asking permission when your use is for a new and different purpose from the original work.
• Fair use powers some of the tools you use every day: search engines like Google, your DVR/TiVo/Hopper, even your computer and your phone, would all be illegal without fair use.
• Fair use provides crucial protection for everyone:
  • Scholars, teachers, journalists, comedians and others who need to quote from existing works to report on culture and express their own ideas about it.
  • Artists, writers, songwriters, vidders, and others who make new art that incorporates and comments on existing art – from T. S. Eliot to Kendrick Lamar.
  • Anyone who uses a blog, Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat to quote, repost, and comment on the culture they love.

More information about this global celebration is available at fairuseweek.org.