A New Article

Fair Use Best Practices for Higher Education Institutions: The Israeli Experience

Elkin-Koren, Niva, Fischman Afori, Orit, Haramati-Alpern, Ronit and Dotan, Amira

available in: ssrn.com/abstract=1648408

This paper provides a snapshot of the process of building the coalition and drafting the Code of Fair Use Best Practices

The fair use doctrine may no longer facilitate the ultimate goal of copyright law, which is to promote production and dissemination of arts and sciences. The high degree of uncertainty stemming from the doctrine is creating a chilling effect and causing users to avoid exploiting the work in ways which the law seeks to encourage under fair use

To address this uncertainty and its chilling effect on educational use, we drafted a Code of Fair Use Best Practices for the use of copyright materials in Higher Education Institutions (hereinafter – HEI) in Israel. We formed a coalition of all the higher education institutions in Israel and negotiated a shared understanding of fair use among the partnering institutions

The initiative was inspired by the visionary initiatives of Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, who worked with various communities in the U.S. to devise particular codes of Fair Use Best Practices. We also carefully examined the lessons from the failure of past American projects, such as the CONFU

(July 25, 2010)

Journal of the Copyright Society of U.S.A, Forthcoming