Best Practices in Online Video

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By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

U.S. law is more lenient about the reuse of short clips from Hollywood films and other copyrighted works than many people realize, argues Ms. Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University. That's because fair-use provisions allow such excerpts in many cases, she says. So professors who integrate these short clips into lecture videos and students who make spoofs for YouTube are probably not breaking the law, she says. The guide, "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video," is available free (http://centerforsocialmedia.org).

Q. Why do professors need to know about the legality of making parody videos or mash-ups on YouTube?

A. Video is being used in instruction for a variety of reasons. Students like to make videos for their assignments. Or professors might be head of a club or association where video is being used, and they need to know what are the terms. And they sometimes make this material for their own instructional reasons.

Q. What is the most important takeaway from your best-practices guide?

A. There's a large number of uses that people think are illegal that are legal on the Internet in terms of online video. The emerging culture really uses quotes from existing culture very creatively and extensively and in ways that were technically impossible in the past. Therefore this new culture needs an understanding of what fair use is within the law in order to grow.

Q. Isn't it still difficult, even with these best practices, to know whether a video you're making for a class that uses a Disney clip is legal?

A. There's no guarantee that you will be absolutely safe. Any time you give a speech at a conference, you are not guaranteed that you are using your free-speech rights correctly, but you kind of know what's acceptable because you've been there before. What the codes of best practice do is create a comfort level by telling you what other people already think is normal for video. We are in a situation where we have to recover fair-use rights. Large content companies have worked hard and spent a lot of money to help people forget and to scare people into believing that they don't have that right.

Q. What's the next project you're working on?

A. In November we're going to release a code of best practices for people who use copyrighted material in their teaching — English teachers, humanities, history — and who do use media and journalism and film and video.