Best practices re copyrighted material and fair use per music scholarship

Dear Colleagues:

For some time now I have been trying to find something like a statement of "Best Practices in the Fair Use of Copyrighted Materials in Music Scholarship," and I have finally, quite accidentally, stumbled upon it, thanks to a comment on an article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education.

The document comes form the American Musicological Society and so, like other documents similarly designed to serve specific academic use communities, it comes with a fairly decent pedigree. That said, you know that there will still be publishers who will try to use scare tactics to prevent music scholars from exercising their fair use rights. However, this document may represent the beginning of winning for musicologists the kind of rights recently secured by documentary film makers and media literacy educators, thanks largely to the scholars mentioned in the Chronicle article.

Below is a link to the "Best Practices" document:

http://www.ams-net.org/AMS_Fair_Use_Statement.pdf

And below here is a link to the Chronicle article where I found the comment that included this link as well as a link to a journal article on popular music that includes quotations.

http://chronicle.com/article/Pushing-Back-Against-Legal/127690/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

I once discussed this matter with Peter Jaszi who opined that the situation regarding the fair use of copyrighted music is no different from any other copyrighted material except that the publishers are more aggressive about trying to extract money for any and every use of a copyrighted item, regardless of whether its unlicensed use might be perfectly fair.

Tim McGee

p.s. The AMS Statement of Best Practices ends with a warning about additional prohibitions under DMCA and asserts that "this question has not been addressed by the courts to date." I think that assertion is inaccurate. I believe the courts (or maybe it was the Library of Congress) have since ruled in our favor, i.e., we educators who need to circumvent copy protection technologies for educational purposes are free to do so.

--
Timothy C. McGee, Ph.D.
Associate Director for Faculty Development
Rider University
2083 Lawrenceville Road
Lawrenceville, NJ 08648-3099
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