Fair Use and the Video Essay

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This assignment is meant to teach students about the doctrine of fair use by using the video essay. It is activist in nature, as Suzanne Scott frames her classroom efforts as generating not only these video essays but also a code of best practices for exercising fair use in media making. It is incumbent upon multimodal authors to understand the four tenets of fair use and to advance their own fair-use claims, which are deliberate and defensible. Scott’s approach puts transformation at the fore, allowing students to deeply understand their rights and obligations. Current copyright law did not anticipate the digital, and many digital scholars feel it is unethical to neglect issues of fair use in the classroom since it governs who may speak with media and who will be silenced. Additional context can be found in Scott’s article “Teaching Transformativity/Transformative Teaching: Fair Use and the Video Essay.