Copies, Copying, Copyright and Copy Wrongs

One issue that often confronts us is whether and how to use materials what we've discovered in our work. In the course of recently responding to an e-mail on this question, I wrote...

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The Leadership Challenge licenses their materials for use by other organizations at a cost of something like $100 to $200 per participant.

You can contact them at www.leadershipchallenge.com for information.

Use of this material also requires attending a training program which costs about $3,000

If your budget won't accommodate this kind of costs, there is nothing to prevent you from developing your own material/learning tasks loosely based on their content.

What is in view here is the concept of "fair use" which is an aspect of US Copyright law. (Not to be confused with the commonly known practice of "copy things right".)

One difficulty is finding out what the honest parameters of fair use actually are. Organizations who produce materials that might be duplicated don't want you to know that there is such a thing as the "fair use" provision so they will tell you it does not exist.

On the other hand, people who want to use anything they can find on the Internet or elsewhere without payment, acknowledgement or permission assume that until they get stopped there is no problem.

The government seems reluctant to issue guidelines for the "fair use" of copyrighted materials, preferring to operate on a "case-by-case" basis. This practice is also known as the "copyright lawyer full employment act" provision.

Those who have ventured to extrapolate principles or guidelines from case law end up with questions like:

1. Will the material be used in "not-for-profit" settings?

2. What percentage of the original material is used?

3. Will the material be used in face-to-face instructional settings?

4. In what country will the material be used? (U.S. copyright law is sometimes different from international copyright law.)

5. Is exact representation of the original material used, or just the general sense of a concept?

6. Are you talking with people who are trainers, or people who are lawyers?

It would be great if some Christian organizations could get together and come up with something like Christian musicians have done where an organization could pay a fee of $100 to $500 per year to get an overall license for using copyrighted materials throughout their organization. It would provide payment to the copyright holders, but also put the use of materials at a level that organizations could afford.