Brett Trout has a great summary of Fair Use law as it pertains particularly to small business owners. If you are using part of a work that may be protected under copyright (to someone other than yourself) for any purpose, you owe it to yourself to consider whether your use may constitute copyright infringement. If you are not sure, but think you are protected by “fair use”, you definitely want to check out this post!
Brett does an excellent job of describing fair use, laying out the legal test in language that is easy to understand, and explaining what you can do to lessen the risk of being sued. He also stresses that the issue is, generally, too complex for a layman to analyze on their own with any confidence.
The first thing is to never believe anything about copyright law unless you hear it from a copyright lawyer. Not a regular lawyer, a copyright lawyer…
What is Fair Use?
Sometimes it is permissible to use limited portions of a
copyrighted work, including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, news reporting, scholarly reports… The quoted material, however, must not be unreasonably large and must not destroy the market for the original work (quoting the salacious portions of Monica Lewinsky’s memoirs).…
In determining whether your copying constitutes “fair use” the courts will look at:
1) The purpose and character of your work-Are you making money from the copies?
2) Nature of copyrighted work-Is it a form book meant to be copied?
3) Amount of work taken-Are you taking 90% of the work or 2%?
4) Economic impact of taking-Are you taking the 2% that makes people want to buy the original (Lewinsky passages)?
…
Large corporations often use a track record of putting infringers out of business to extract settlements. The smartest move for you is to review your copyright material beforehand to check for any potential copyright problems. If you own a business, be sure to include “fair use” policies in your employee handbook. With copyright issues, an ounce of prevention can be worth about seven figures of cure.
There is a lot of other good stuff in the full article. If this interests you, be sure to read it all. Do you know of anyone that got in trouble for copyright infringement or who successfully relied on a fair use defense? If so, I would like to hear about it in the comments.
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