 it looks like we are at the hour. So I think we can go ahead and kick it off. So again, thank you all for being here and happy fair use week. We, it's the 11th annual fair use week. And so we're very, very excited to be celebrating this fair use week with the US Copyright Office. So just a few housekeeping notes really briefly. We're gonna hear from George for about 30 minutes or so, and then we'll save about 15 minutes for Q and A. So we might be a little bit flexible with how that works out, but please use the Q and A function at the bottom of your screen to submit any questions that you have for George while he's speaking. And then at the end, I'll read them aloud and we'll hear from George's expertise. So George Chironi is deputy director of the Office of Public Information and Education with the fund acronym PI. At the United States Copyright Office. And George, we are really honored to have you with us for this 11th annual fair use week. So that's it for me. I folks are here to hear from you. So thank you so much and please the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much and welcome to fair use week. So we're talking about fair use. It's part of that whole life cycle of copyright. So I thought I'll start out with talking about copyright in general and then getting into where fair use fits into that. So let us begin. By the way, I'm not an attorney. So I'm not going to give you any legal advice today. Maybe the only legal advice I'll give you is that if you need legal advice, seek an attorney. Today I'm going to be giving you resources and information that you can use for your own decision making for your own research. So let us get started. What is copyright? You've seen the little C symbol, right? And you know what it is probably, but just to remind you, copyright is a protection that's grounded in the US Constitution. The Constitution talks about promoting the progress of science and useful arts to writers and inventors for a limited period of time so they can have the rights to the writings and discovery. So here we're talking about those authors and those writings. Of course, things have come a long way since the Constitution and the first copyright law. So it covers a lot more than just writings. It covers published and unpublished works. And there are different kinds of intellectual property that you hear about and that get used interchangeably sometimes. And there is some overlap between them. Copyright is what we're talking about today. I hear a lot about trademarks. Trademarks identify a business or a process and usually have to do with business entities, you know, the Coca-Cola or Nike, even the Coca-Cola bottle covered by trademark because it is identifying the product that it's associated with. Patent tends to cover useful items, engines, light bulbs, things that are invented and that are mechanical or electrical or even agricultural. These are products and utilities and they have that kind of function. Trade secrets are another little niche in that and that is having to do with the process behind creating things that has kept secret to a company. There is some overlap between all of these, but today we're gonna be focusing on copyright. The first copyright law was passed in 1790. It was two pages long. It covered maps, charts and books. We have a lot more now, right? Then just maps, charts and books and it's been amended and it continues to be amended quite often. Today the copyright law is 460 pages when printed out. So that's a lot to digest, right? But there are just some basic facts and basic concepts which we'll go over today. So you don't have to read all 460 pages, but if you want to, all of this information, by the way that I'm giving you today is on copyright.gov. Copyright.gov is where you're gonna find all of this information. I'll mention that a few more times. So I mentioned the law continues to be updated and the latest big update to copyright law was the passage of the case act which established a small claims tribunal within the copyright office. And we're really excited about this because it gives opportunities for people whose rights are infringed to go to a small claims court instead of the very, very expensive and very long process of federal court. So this is for smaller claims for less than $30,000 and we've been doing this coming up on two years. We've had about 600 claims go through the system in various stages. So that is really an opportunity for people to process their infringement cases in a way that is a lot more accessible. User friendly and cheap, it's only $100. So here's our first trivia question. Let me make sure that I can see the Q and A, yes I can. Okay, so A, B, C, or D for work to be protected under copyright, A be original, B include a copyright notice, C be a professional quality, or D have a value of $35. Go ahead and put your answers in the Q and A. Let me see what your guesses are, okay. All right, I see some guesses coming in so far. And a lot of you know this stuff, I knew you would, but I just thought it'd be a little fun to go over it. It is, oh, look, everybody's got it right. It's be original, okay. Be original and have some level of creativity. You know, I'm gonna go back in seconds just to, it doesn't have to have a copyright notice. It's a good idea, but that's not required. Quality is not a factor at all, nor is the value. Basically be original and be created in a tangible form of some way. That is very important. So what kinds of things are covered by copyright? It's more than just the maps, charts, and books of 1790, because we've come a long way since then and the law has been amended. So it does still include literary works and the types that you would think of, books and magazines and newspapers, newsletters, software because of an interesting little quirk and copyright law is considered a literary work. The actual code is a literary work. Of course, the musical works with accompanying lyrics, dramatic works, pantomimes and choreographic works. Those are not social dance, but actual choreography. Of course, pictorial graphic and sculptural works, paintings, photography, sculptures, all of those and motion pictures, other audio-visual works, sound recordings, which are different from musical works. Okay, so music with the lyrics and music and sound recording is the actual recording of that. Can be two separate copyrights involved and architectural works basically for buildings that house people on like homes and so forth. Although interestingly, Bill, was just introduced last week to extend that to golf courses, but not mini-golf, which is interesting. We'll see if that gets any traction in Congress. Although I think mini-golf should be included, right? There's a lot of creative work there, but anyway, we will see. So what's not covered? Okay, what's not covered? Ideas, and why not? Because look, copyright is meant to encourage creativity, right? And if every idea were locked up by copyright, that would be a monopoly that would just stifle creativity. Procedures, processes, systems, the reason they're not covered is because they're more likely covered by patents, same with methods of operations. Concepts, again, with ideas, principles, discoveries, these are ideas until you fix something in a format that's not covered by copyright. So that's an important distinction that you have to have some sort of fixation in some form. Okay, so I mean, I already gave you an answer here, but take a guess, the work is protected under copyright when, A, the author mails a copy of the work to herself, B, the work is created and fixed in any format, C, the work is submitted to the copyright office, or D, the work is published or displayed publicly. So let's see your guesses again in the Q and A. Thank you for answering those. And I see some good guesses, any more guesses? The answer is created and fixed in any format. Okay, so has to be created, has to be fixed, what is fixed in any format mean? Well, no, it's not just a quill pen like you see here, but your phone is basically a good way of fixing something in a format, right? Either recording, you take a picture, or any other software that you're using to create something that is then protected under copyright, as soon as you create it, then you can register your work, and why would you do that? Well, so copyright exists as soon as you fix it, the original work in a tangible medium, but if you register your work, then you get the added benefit of creating a public record and being able to take somebody to court or our new copyright claims board in case of infringement, and you got to register your work to do that. So that's really important, it's cheap, it's easy. So we encourage people to register their works, it's not mandatory, but it is highly encouraged. So here is another trivia. The first work registered under federal copyright law, I have four things mentioned, by the way, these are all real books. So take a guess and guess which book was the first work registered under federal copyright law in 1790. In those days, works were registered with district courts, that was before the US Copyright Office even existed. So it didn't come into play until 1870. So take a guess. I see some guesses here, very good, thank you. And the answer is spelling book. Yes, that was the first book registered under copyright, the Philadelphia spelling book. And here's another, here's another, because I love the trivia. What's the largest thing the Copyright Office has registered? Not actually the object, but a picture of the object, because we don't have room to store these things, right? So what do you think it is? Brooklyn Bridge, St. Louis Arch, the Statue of Liberty, or Disney Castle? Take a guess. Put your answer in the Q&A, please. Let me see what you are guessing on this. Okay, all right. And the answer is Statue of Liberty. So yes, that was registered by the architect who designed the Statue of Liberty. All right, one more, because I love the trivia. What's the first motion picture registered with the Copyright Office? These are also real things. And up until two years ago, we thought it was one thing and then we had a researcher discover it with something else. So up until quite recently, we thought it was the sneeze, but it's not the sneeze, it's the blacksmith shop. And they're a bunch of people, they're actually actors and they're not really blacksmiths. So it's also considered the first movie to include actors because they're not really blacksmiths, but that's what it was. And now that was when motion pictures were registered as a series of photographs, because of course that's really just what a motion picture is, a bunch of photographs. All right, so how long does Copyright last? So for the most part, the duration of Copyright is an author's lifetime plus 70 years, that's that part in the middle there. Okay, it's a little bit different for things earlier and for a work made for hire, that is something done for a company in the course of business, it's a little bit more, but for most of works by individuals, author's lifetime plus 70 years, that is a duration. And if a work is in the public domain, what does that mean? A, it exists on the internet. B, access to the work is free of cost. C, it's available at a public library or D, the work can be freely copied or used. Let's see your answers in the Q and A. Want to see some answers here. All right, thank you, okay, good. And yes, it means it can be freely copied and used. And so every year a whole bunch of works come into the public domain. So this year works from 1928 came into the public domain. We've got to have things like the Great Gatsby, Winnie the Pooh, when I was young, the Winnie the Pooh book when that came into the public domain, someone immediately made a horror film based on Winnie the Pooh. So you're free to do what you'd like with it. This year, of course, is Steamboat Willie, who was the first appearance of Mickey Mouse and the Mickey Mouse kingdom, so to speak. So that got a lot of press this year as well. And so when we talk about copyright, it's a right, but really it's a bundle of rights, a whole bunch of things. The right to reproduce, to make a copy, that's part of the bundle of rights, to distribute, to prepare derivative works. You've got your great screenplay, you're making a movie, that's a derivative work. Performing or displaying the work publicly, public performance of digital audio transmissions and proper attribution of visual arts works. And when you're the copyright owner, you have all of these rights and you can do things with those rights, you can lease them, you can license them, you can bequeath them, either all of them or parts of them, you can let people use them freely if you so desire. They're your rights and as an owner and you can do various things with them and they have some value. So when Sony wants to make a new motion picture, they will sometimes use these rights as collateral for a loan for a motion picture so that they have value. Now, so the concept of copyright, it's meant to be a balance, right? And Congress and the courts try to achieve this balance so that you have those exclusive rights, which I just mentioned, reproducing, distributing and so forth. But at the same time, copyright is not meant to stifle creativity, it's meant to encourage and aspire it. So at the same time that there are rights, there are also limitations on those rights and that's covered in sections 107 through 122 of the Copyright Act, we're gonna define that, copyright.gov. So there are several of them, Fair Use is one we were talking about today, but there are some others that are very important and relevant as well. For example, section 108, I'm just gonna mention that briefly here. Section 108 is a part of the Copyright Act that's specifically geared toward libraries. It allows libraries and archives to reproduce and distribute certain copyrighted works without permission, limited basis for preservation, replacement and research. It can make copies of works that are under copyright protection to send to other libraries, permits some copies for personal research and in the areas of preservation. So I would encourage you if you're using this to read carefully what it says in section 108, which you can find where copyright.gov, right? And there have been a lot of discussion since section 108 was made part of the law in 1976 to upgrade and revise section 108. Copyright Office has done numerous reports on this and so have others, but as it stands now, it does have certain provisions in it. And I should mention that all of these provisions with the exclusive rights, limitations on exclusive rights, 107 through 122. Sections 108 through 122 are very specific and they're written in a way that you can read it and understand and there's a bright line to explain what those exclusive rights are. But fair use is written in a different way. Fair use is an affirmative defense in court to using a work. So it's not, it doesn't have that bright line. So copyright lawyers will often say it depends and that's true because fair use is considered in courts and also in the copyright claims board on a case by case basis. It's very, very case specific. So that makes the job harder for people who are using certain works in fair use because you gotta do some research and analysis and think about whether or not that would be an acceptable affirmative defense in court if it ever came to that. It talks about reproduction for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research. These are examples to why it says such as. So that doesn't mean that every time there's news reporting or teaching or criticism that that's fair use. These are examples. So that's important to understand. And the way the courts look at this, this is spelled out in the law and there are four factors that are analyzed, okay? The first is the purpose and character. I'll read this out first. The purpose and character of the use including whether such use is of commercial nature or is nonprofit educational purposes, okay? Looking at different cases, courts are more likely to find that nonprofit educational and non-commercial commercial uses are fair. Not that all of them are. It's not, as I said, a bright line but it's more likely that a court will see that as a fair use than not. And they take this factor and balance it against the other factors as well. Transformative uses are more likely to be considered fair. And those are cases where something is added new to something, making it different. Here are two examples of transformative use, okay? In this first one, libraries that provide Google with books to scan were protected by fair use when the libraries later used the resulting digital scans for preservation, full-text search engines and electronic access for disabled persons. And they were considered to be transformative. The court didn't find any evidence of financial harm in that case. Now you contrast that in the case where in an anniversary tribute on Facebook, Fox News producer posted an iconic unmodified photo of firefighters wasting a flag after the 9-11 bombings causing it, causing it raising the flag at ground zero. And that photo was juxtaposed with an image of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima. The photographer sued and Fox claimed fair use arguing the posting of the social media by its nature was transformative. But the district court said, no, the posting itself was not a fair use. That was not a transformative use. So that just shows you it's very, very fact specific. And you have to look very closely at how the court considered these factors when they made their decisions. The nature of the work, okay? This is also very important in consideration with fair use. Relate to the purpose of using a creative or imaginative work is less likely to support a claim of fair use than using a factual work or news. And why is that? That's because facts in themselves are not protected by copyright. Like there are 50 states in the United States. That's a fact plus DC where I am now. And territories, these are facts. These are not copyrightable in any way because they're just facts that anybody can use. And that's sort of what's behind this. Also use of an unpublished work is less likely to be considered fair. So these are all factors. Another factor is the amount and the substantiality of a work. If a large portion of the work is used, fair use is less likely to be found. There's no magic numbers, no magic number of pages or no magic number of minutes in a song or seconds. Because think of it this way, look a child's book, children's book might only have eight pages, right? Might be very small. But it really gets to whether the heart of the work is used, that's what courts have looked at. And lastly, this is an important one, not necessarily more important, but courts do look at this, the effect on the use of the market and whether someone's using a work is going to affect someone else's livelihood in essence, right? If person A is taking the work of person B, modifying it slightly perhaps, but it's really damaging the sales, the livelihood of the owner, then that would be less likely to be considered a fair use. We have a lot on our website, copyright.gov and this circular 21 has 24 pages long of a very detailed analysis of different kinds of situations for libraries and archives. So I encourage you to read that. I can't go over the whole 24 pages now because we don't have time for that. But I encourage you to read that and you'll get some more insight into that. And now I'm going to stop sharing this and start sharing our website, copyright.gov, fair dash use, okay? And on our website, we have an index, this is really useful, okay? We have an index of fair use cases that have been adjudicated all the way back I think it goes way back. What was it first year in 1841? Okay, well, we have a lot of cases. I didn't even realize we went back that far. So these are different cases and you'll see this is kind of fun to use. The first part of it, you can choose which courts were involved. Do you wanna look just the Supreme Court cases or do you wanna look at cases in circuit courses to the courts where you live? That's very useful too because you'll see that as you look at this, not every court and not every circuit court follows exactly the same path. There are some nuances and some differences. You can also select the type of work or the type of use. Is it a parody? Is it a textual work? As you click and unclick these buttons, the different cases will change. So you can take a look and decide which ones you wanna read. And when you click on one of the cases, this is a famous case. This was adjudicated quite recently, the Andy Warhol case. And when you look at this, you can see a nice one little over, one page summary of the key facts, what the issues were, and how the court held in that. It's a little bit of reading, but it's much, much easier to read than looking at the entire case file, which can be many, many volumes of pages. But this will go through the facts of the case and outline that for you. So it's really useful to take a look. I gotta spend some time on this to look and see, hear the different parody cases. You know, here are ones having to do with education and scholarship. So there are a lot of different categories you can use here and take a look and see how courts ruled in those particular cases. It's not going to definitively sort of answer the question for you, is my use of fair use or not? But it may get too pretty close to getting an answer that will help you make a decision. So we have that for you. We keep it up to date and it's there for you, for you to use. So, and just to sort of like take one back step about permission, is the use a public domain? You know, the works, as I mentioned, if it's in the public domain, you don't have to go any further. You can use the work for whatever you'd like and that's it, finished. If you can use any of the other exemptions, if you can use section 108, you don't have to worry about fair use. So you can just use that and go on your way. So keep that in mind. If one of these other exceptions applies, you can just go ahead and use that and not have to go any further. Thinking about fair use or permission, but if you do have to ask for permission, there are ways to do that. You first need to find out who owns the work and what sort of rights they have and get in touch with them. Now, some creators have a Creative Commons license and they've asserted that it's okay for everybody to use their works. Other people want to negotiate a license, really depends. You can look through our catalog online, copyright.gov, look through our card catalog and you can also contact different licensing organizations, especially for licensing music to see who owns a work and what sort of rights do they have and what sort of rights do you need, what would you like? Do you want to use, that's an important thing too when you're asking permission to make sure to ask exactly what you need. Are you just using this to make a copy that you're going to use in a presentation or classroom or are you going to put it on a website? Is this going to be a recorded performance or some sort of live performance? Be very specific so that you are asking for the rights that you actually need and that they can give you. Many people will be happy to give them to you. Other people might want to issue a license. You can negotiate with a rights holder for licenses or you can go through a licensing organization if they hold the licenses to whatever works you're interested in. And here are other ways to make things easier if you're in a bind, provide a link to something, list titles, listing sources. So creating your own content, these are ways that you can mitigate this if you are finding difficulty in getting permission or clearing rights for something. I already mentioned this but another trivia. So what is the Copyright Claims Board? I think you all will know this one right off because I just mentioned it and it is the A3 member tribunal with extensive expertise in copyright matters and providing the streamlined alternative to federal court. Our website, copyright.gov, has a lot of videos. There's one on Fair Use. There's one on the public domain. There are a bunch of others. I encourage you, there was one that has cats in it so we love that. I encourage you to watch these videos and learn a little bit. Just mentioning this, this is not directly related to Fair Use but we are getting a lot of attention, a lot of focus in our office on artificial intelligence and how that intersects with copyright. We asked members of the public for comments. We've got about 10,000 of them and we're reviewing those and we'll be issuing a report in various parts very soon to Congress to advise on what we think Congress should do or not do in regard to AI and copyright. Copyright.gov is where you find all this. I've mentioned that before and now it is time for me to stop sharing and answer any questions that you might have. I've whizzed through a lot here so feel free to ask whatever you would like. Thanks, George. That was really great and I think every fair, I'm just gonna, as we wait for questions to come in, I think every Fair Use week, we sort of reinforce the importance of kind of going back to the fundamentals and the basics of Fair Use because there are people that come into the library profession or in grad school or whatever and might not have misperceptions about what Fair Use is and how it can be used. So I just really appreciate this and I think it will live on. I didn't see any questions. I did see a comment. Someone said they love the Fair Use index and recommend it all the time. They really like the one page summaries and I'll second that, you know, especially for folks that like myself who are not attorneys, like it's really useful to be able to go and dig in and kind of get that synopsis and that summary. So that's really useful. So thank you. Yeah, I like the one page summaries too and I don't have to read the whole case file. I also, you mentioned, I know, hey, I was top of mind and I thank you. We chatted about this a little bit ahead of time too. So I appreciate you mentioning the copyright office study. I don't know if there's any, if folks have seen the letter that came out from Shiro Perlmutter, the register of copyrights today but encourage you to take a look at that. But George, if there's any, I mean, you already said sort of the report will come out in sections, but anything else you want to sort of say to that kind of breaking news, I think we're, yeah, open to it. Yeah, so with our AI study, I'm gonna just let me put a link to the letter. Okay, well, I'll look for that. So with AI, we're looking at a couple of different, couple of different themes. We're gonna be talking about, advising Congress about the rights of publicity, having to do with using a likeness of a person, whether a celebrity or not, in some way, using AI. We're gonna talk about copyright ability. And then of course, which is what parts can be protected by copyright and what can't. And then also the training models, using copyrighted materials to train AI and where does that fit in? So all of these are factors that are of a lot of interest to everyone. And so we're gonna be, we've had to go through these 10,000 comments with, by the way, there was some discussion about whether we should use AI to read the comments, but no, no. We're reading them all with human beings and so that we can categorize all the comments and we're really grateful that people have submitted that, but we did not use AI to read the comments. We get that question a lot actually, or we're using human beings, so. That's interesting though, because I know there was a hearing on sort of legislative branch use of AI and the Library of Congress, you know, testified, Dr. Hayden testified and talked about like the very cool ways that, you know, the library is using AI and opportunities for the copyright office as well. That's right, and we, you know, and that's a distinction also that was made in that hearing about the use of AI tools in the workplace and in different research settings versus generative AI, which is really the core of the issues that we're studying or generative AI and how that falls into place with copyright law. We issued guidance last March, so almost a year ago, on how registrants can register works that contain some AI-created material. For example, a comic book where the words are written by a person and the images are created by AI. We issued guidance explaining how you can register the work and exclude the AI-created content in your application. That's actually not a new kind of feature. There's always been an opportunity to exclude content from a registration if it's not something you created yourself. Thanks for digging into that a bit. I'm gonna give one more chance for folks to put questions in the Q&A. If you have them, and I will mention my email address is in the chat, so if folks have any questions or wanna follow up on any of this, we're definitely having in-depth conversations in the research library community about many of the issues that George touched on, and particularly all things AI, right? And so that's my email address. Don't hesitate to reach out. And so I think what we'll do is we will grab these links in the recording and we'll make sure to kind of share this and make sure it lives as a resource for this and future fair use weeks. And yeah, I don't see any more questions. So I will just express our gratitude, George, for your time and your expertise and your knowledge and the resources that you shared. We really appreciate it and hope that we can do it again next fair use week. So thank you. All right, thank you and happy fair use week. Fair use week. Thank you.