Fair Use in Education for the Twenty-first Century
In 2005 the University of Minnesota created the Fair Use Analysis (FUA) Tool, an interactive online application intended to educate users and foster defensible fair use assertions, in accordance with copyright law, by guiding users through a robust, fact-specific, four-factor fair use analysis.
In this research project, an interdisciplinary team used a quasi-experimental design to compare participants' use of the FUA tool with a control condition in iterative cycles to determine if use of the tool improved participants' understanding of the four factors involved in fair use analysis, the quality of their reasoning with those factors, and the accuracy of their fair use conclusions.
Results indicated that use of the FUA tool significantly improved both understanding of fair use and quality of reasoning, compared to the control condition. However, accuracy of conclusions was not significantly affected. A content analysis of participants' responses revealed several aspects of fair use law that participants found particularly difficult to comprehend.
A paper describing this project, "Fair Use Education for the Twenty-first Century: A Comparative Study of the Use of an Interactive Tool to Guide Decision Making," has been published in the journal Innovate (2007, vol. 4, no. 2). See also example copyright scenarios students used in making a decision about fair use (Exhibit 1) and the rubric used to score subjects' responses to each scenario (Exhibit 3).
