Rich Stim is corporate counsel for Nolo. Rich is the author of several Nolo intellectual property books including:

Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference
Patent Pending in 24 Hours

Music Law: How to Run Your Band’s Business

Rich also writes two blogs for Nolo, What Price Justice and Nolo’s Patent, Copyright & Trademark Blog, and provides information about trade secrets and nondisclosure agreements at NDAs For Free. He lives in San Francisco and has been without cable TV since 2006.

Nolo has published a new edition of the volume Getting Permission, a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute book on securing the use of copyrighted images, text, music and more. Moreover, Nolo has granted permission to the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use to provide free and open access to salient chapters dealing with copyright, fair use, and web-based content. Fair Use’s Executive Editor Mary Minow has a brief interview with Rich Stim about the new edition of the book, and what’s new in fair use law.

Mary Minow: thanks so much for sharing the rich Nolo content with the Fair Use site. What have been some of the recent changes worth pointing out?

Rich Stim: The mix of recent fair use case hasn’t been too surprising. For example, we learned it’s not a fair use to create a Harry Potter lexicon or to create a postage stamp from a sculpture. And it’s not a fair use/parody to create a sequel to Catcher in the Rye. It is a fair use, however, to reproduce movie monster magazine covers in a book about the cover artist. No surprises with any of these decisions.

The most important fair use ruling may have been Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. In that case, Universal Music issued a takedown notice for a video of a child dancing to the song, ‘Let’s Go Crazy,’ by Prince. The owner of the video claimed that since Universal didn’t consider the issue of fair use, Universal could have not had a “good faith belief” they were entitled to a takedown. Faced with this novel issue, a district court agreed that the failure to consider fair use when sending a DMCA notice could give rise to a claim of failing to act in good faith. That may have an effect on the trend towards automated mass DMCA notices. Let’s hope so.

Minow: What’s your assessment of these changes with regards to the big picture of copyright law, especially as it affects the higher education community?

Stim: I’m not sure much has happened recently will affect the higher education community. It’s all been business as usual although we’ll see what happens as a result of this recent ruling regarding the Google book archive. That may have a profound effect on the ability to access orphaned works.

There was a recent case that may, by analogy, effect the ability to claim fair use when copying electronic texts. In Capitol Records Inc. v. Alaujan, a defendant in a music file sharing case was prohibited from claiming fair use because he had failed to provide evidence that his copying of music files involved any transformative use. The court held that “In the end, fair use is not a referendum on fairness in the abstract …” In other words, making a copy of a digital file and using that file for the purpose for which it was intended (in the case of purloined MP3s, that means copying it to listen to) can not be a fair use. To some people that may seem to chip away at the underpinnings of the Betamax case in which time-shifting of television shows for the purpose of later viewing was permitted as a fair use.