Friday, March 05, 2010

Learning About Fair Use

In my forthcoming Math book, No Kid of Ours is Failing at Math (How Parents Can Help), I employ quotations from various other sources to help make a few of my key points. In each case, the excerpt used is short - part of a paragraph, typically - and credited clearly to the author, book, page number and edition from which I took it. Recently, however, I got to wondering if what I'd done was actually kosher, within the realm of copyright law.

From the reading I've done so far, it sounds like I'm probably within the lines laid out by the "fair use" portion of copyright law. In particular, besides the brevity aspect (keeping the quotations short rather than copying pages of material), my usage of each hopefully qualifies as "quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations". After all, this is a book intended to show parents how they can help their kids with Math, and wherever I've included an external quotation, the excerpt was selected for its potential ability to drive home a specific point of mine. I'm also inclined to believe that each of the individuals whose work I've quoted would be supportive of the goals of my book - that of raising the general Math aptitude of the next generation - although I'm not sure that would necessarily mean much if any of the copyrighted material were controlled by publishing entities.

Anyway, as of right now I think I'm OK with what I've done. You'll get to judge for yourself in about three weeks, if you're interested.

[Update: In Canada, apparently it's "fair dealing" rather than "fair use", and there are six criteria rather than the American four. However, the general outline of the effect upon copyright law looks very similar.]

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