For NYCDH week, I attended the Fair Use workshop (Transformed, I’m Sure) presented by Jill Cirasella, who gave a really compelling and informative presentation on the history of copyright, fair use, and where the reasonable boundaries of a DH project might be with regard to fair use. I thought this workshop was super interesting, especially because it falls into the one of the many Venn diagrams of my interests: law, academics, and transformative works.

Jill truly went above and beyond in keeping the audience engaged, and I especially loved that she used the Grinch’s too-small heart growing in size as a comparison to case precedent allowing the expansion of the fair use clause. The presentation itself was incredibly comprehensive, covering the “letter of the law” in addition to the spirit of it. I also thought it was great that the presentation was centrally focused on the idea of transformative works, because in a lot of ways, that’s what we do when we work with data—we transform it into a narrative, asking questions about it and working with it to obtain answers.

Coming into the presentation, I actually already knew a lot of the case precedent that Jill cited, but I still learned something new—I didn’t know that the World Intellectual Property Organization recognizes indigenous law supremacy, which was absolutely fantastic to hear. Many countries, including the US, are notoriously bad at respecting indigenous people’s rights, so to have a major international governing body actually acknowledge that supremacy feels like a big deal.

One thing I wish we could have seen from the presentation is the role of Disney’s lobbying power in expanding the length of the public domain—I know it’s not necessarily within the scope of how we can work with fair use in the digital humanities, but as an aside in the presentation, it would have been great to show how arbitrary public domain lengths are.

If my group was working with Spotify data (for example), I’d probably be a little more concerned about fair use and copyright law in our project and go through the really helpful fair use checklist Jill provided, but because SCOTUS data is (by nature of the necessity for transparency in US government) public, we likely won’t need to do this. However, if against all odds we find that our work goes so smoothly that we might expand our scope to include papers by constitutional law scholars, then we might have to go through the checklist. Whatever the case, I’m really glad I attended this workshop—knowing the full extent of your rights with regard to copyright law is a great asset to have while working with all sorts of data!