The Center for Social Media at American University in Washington DC has released a code of best practice for scholars in the field of communication.
The code provides guidance on the ‘fair use’ provision of the USA copyright law.
Copyright compliance is especially tricky for researchers and teachers in mass communication and media studies:
“Scholars who work on the humanistic side of the discipline, especially history, depend more on citation and quotation of closely read sources.
“Media and communication products, often from commercial media companies, are important raw data for communication research. The raw material may range from newspaper articles to blog commentaries to radio commercials to television programs to computer software to children’s educational media to election advertising and reporting to video games to e-mails to social networking pages. Scholars… often archive data relating to their research interests, in analog and digital formats, for long periods of time. They may re-use this data for different research projects over time.”
(via BoingBoing)
Tags: research, copyright, media and communication