Fair Use

Fair Use is the part of U.S. Copyright Law that allows you to defend your use of someone else's work without asking their permission. In academic research, Fair Use is what allows us to use someone else's ideas and words (as long as we give them credit by citing our sources!) without asking them first. There are four factors that are considered when determining if something counts as Fair Use: the purpose of the use, how widely the original work was distributed, the effect on sales of the original work, and the amount of the original work that was used.

The balance between Fair Use and Copyright is not always clear and is often decided in court. To help explain it is A Fair(y) Use Tale, a video montage created through the fair use of clips from some familiar movies.