research-article

Remixers' understandings of fair use online

Authors:

Amy S. BruckmanAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

Pages 1023 - 1032

https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531695

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

How do online content creators make decisions about copyright law? In the course of day-to-day online activities, Internet users are forced to make subtle judgments about one of the most confusing and nuanced areas of law, copyright and fair use. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eleven content creators who participate in remix and fan creation activities online, to try to probe their legal understandings and attitudes. We found that social norms that emerge among these content creators do not always track to what the law actually says, but are often guided more by ethical concerns. Our participants showed surprisingly similar patterns of understandings and confusions, impacting technology use and interaction online.

References

[1]

Aufderheide, P., Jaszi, P., and Brown, E.N. The Good, The Bad, and The Confusing: User-Generated Video Creators on Copyright. 2007.

[2]

Aufderheide, P. and Jaszi, P. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back Into Copyright. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2011.

[3]

Babbie, E.R. The Basics of Social Research. Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, 2009.

[4]

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3, 2 (2006), 77--101.

[5]

Cheliotis, G. and Yew, J. An analysis of the social structure of remix culture. Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies - C&T'09, (2009).

Digital Library

[6]

Cook, E., Teasley, S.D., and Ackerman, M.S. Contribution, commercialization & audience: understanding participation in an online creative community. Proceedings of the ACM 2009 International Conference on Supporting Group Work, (2009), 41--50.

Digital Library

[7]

Coppa, F. and Tushnet, R. How to Suppress Women's Remix. Camera Obscura 26, 2 (2011), 131--139.

[8]

Coppa, F. A Brief History of Media Fandom. In K. Hellekson and K. Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. McFarland Press, 2006, 41--59.

[9]

Diakopoulos, N., Luther, K., Medynskiy, Y. (Eugene), and Essa, I. The evolution of authorship in a remix society. Proceedings of the 18th conference on Hypertext and hypermedia - HT'07, (2007), 133.

Digital Library

[10]

Ellickson, R.C. Of Coase and Cattle: Dispute Resolution Among Neighbors in Shasta County. Stanford Law Review 38, (1986), 623--687.

[11]

1Fiesler, C. Everything I Need To Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content. Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law 10, 3 (2008), 729--762.

[12]

Fiesler, C. The Chilling Tale of Copyright in Online Creative Communities. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students 19, 4 (2013).

Digital Library

[13]

Gibson, J. Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law. The Yale Law Journal 116, (2007), 882--951.

[14]

Graveline, J. Debunking Common Misconceptions and Myths. College & Undergraduate Libraries 17, 1 (2010), 100--105.

[15]

Guest, G., Bunce, A., and Johnson, L. How Many Interviews Are Enough?: An Experiment with Data Saturation and Variability. Field Methods 18, 1 (2006), 59--82.

[16]

Hetcher, S.A. Using Social Norms to Regulate Fan Fiction and Remix Culture. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 157, (2009), 1869--1935.

[17]

Hill, B.M. and Monroy-hernández, A. The Remixing Dilemma: The Trade-off Between Generativity and Originality. American Behavioral Scientist 57, 5 (2013), 643---663.

[18]

Humphreys, S. The Challenges of Intellectual Property for Users of Social Networking Sites': A Case Study of Ravelry. Mind Trek, (2008).

Digital Library

[19]

Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 1992.

[20]

Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture. NYU Press, 2006.

[21]

Karpovich, A.I. The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities. In K. Hellekson and K. Bussee, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. McFarland & Company, North Carolina, 2006, 171--188.

[22]

Lange, P.G. and Ito, M. Creative Production. In M. Ito, ed., Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. MIT Press, Boston, MA, 2010.

[23]

Larsen, L.O. and Nærland, T.U. Documentary in a Culture of Clearance: A Study of Knowledge of and Attitudes Toward Copyright and Fair Use Among Norwegian Documentary Makers. Popular Communication 8, 1 (2010), 46--60.

[24]

Lessig, L. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin Group, New York, 2008.

[25]

Loren, L.P. Building a Reliable Semicommons of Creative Works: Enforcement of Creative Commons Licenses and Limited Abandonment of Copyright. George Mason Law Review 14, 1 (2007), 271--328.

[26]

Magee, R.M., Sebastian, M., Novak, A., Mascaro, C.M., Black, A., and Goggins, S.P. #TwitterPlay: A Case Study of Fan Roleplaying Online. CSCW'13, (2013), 199--202.

Digital Library

[27]

Monroy-hernández, A., Hill, B.M., Gonzalez-Rivero, J., and boyd, danah. Computers can't give credit: how automatic attribution falls short in an online remixing community. CHI 2011, (2011), 3421--3430.

Digital Library

[28]

Seidman, I. Interviewing as Qualitative Research. Teachers College Press, 1998.

[29]

Seneviratne, O. and Monroy-hernández, A. Remix Culture on the Web: A Survey of Content Reuse on Different User-Generated Content Websites. Proceedings of Web Science Conference 2010, (2010).

[30]

Sinnreich, A. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 2010.

[31]

Stein, L.E. "This Dratted Thing": Fannish Storytelling Through New Media. In K. Hellekson and K. Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. McFarland Press, 2006, 245--260.

[32]

Tushnet, R. Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity. Law & Contemporary Problems, (2007).

[33]

Tushnet, R. User-Generated Discontent: Transformation in Practice. Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts 10, 2007 (2008), 101--120.

Cited By

Centivany A(2024)Mining, Scraping, Training, GeneratingProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.100961:1(68-79)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/pra2.1009
Jin YLu P(2023)First Price Auction is 1-1/e2 EfficientJournal of the ACM10.1145/361790270:5(1-86)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617902
Scurto HSimilowski TBianchini SCaramiaux B(2023)Probing Respiratory Care With Generative Deep LearningProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100997:CSCW2(1-34)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610099
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Remixers' understandings of fair use online
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy

Recommendations

Chilling Tales: Understanding the Impact of Copyright Takedowns on Transformative Content Creators
CSCW

Though current conversations around automated content moderation often focus on newer contexts for this technology such as harassment or misinformation, one other important use case is copyright detection systems such as YouTube's Content ID. This ...
Reality and Perception of Copyright Terms of Service for Online Content Creation
CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

From amateur creativity to social media status updates, nearly every Internet user is also a content creator-but who owns that content? Policy, including intellectual property rights, is a necessary but often invisible part of online content sharing and ...
Understanding Copyright Law in Online Creative Communities
CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

Copyright law is increasingly relevant to everyday interactions online, from social media status updates to artists showcasing their work. This is especially true in creative spaces where rules about reuse and remix are notoriously gray. Based on a ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

February 2014

1600 pages

ISBN:9781450325400

DOI:10.1145/2531602

General Chairs:
Susan Fussell
Cornell University
,
Wayne Lutters
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
,
Program Chairs:
Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft Research
,
Madhu Reddy
Penn State University

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 February 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CSCW'14

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CSCW'14: Computer Supported Cooperative Work

February 15 - 19, 2014

Maryland, Baltimore, USA

Acceptance Rates

CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CSCW '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

October 18 - 22, 2025

Bergen , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

36
Total Citations
View Citations
616
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)62
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)9

Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Centivany A(2024)Mining, Scraping, Training, GeneratingProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.100961:1(68-79)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/pra2.1009
Jin YLu P(2023)First Price Auction is 1-1/e2 EfficientJournal of the ACM10.1145/361790270:5(1-86)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617902
Scurto HSimilowski TBianchini SCaramiaux B(2023)Probing Respiratory Care With Generative Deep LearningProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100997:CSCW2(1-34)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610099
Yu YMcDonald D(2023)Conflicts of Control: Continuous Blood Glucose Monitoring and Coordinated Caregiving for Teenagers with Type 1 DiabetesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100977:CSCW2(1-32)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610097
Hastings EOjha VAustriaco BKarahalios KBailey B(2023)Composing Team Compositions: An Examination of Instructors' Current Algorithmic Team Formation PracticesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100967:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610096
Fiesler CPaup JZacher C(2023)Chilling Tales: Understanding the Impact of Copyright Takedowns on Transformative Content CreatorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100957:CSCW2(1-21)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610095
Hanley HKumar DDurumeric Z(2023)A Golden Age: Conspiracy Theories' Relationship with Misinformation Outlets, News Media, and the Wider InternetProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100437:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610043
Kowalewski MUtz CDegeling MSchnitzler THerbert FSchaewitz LFarke FBecker SDürmuth M(2023)52 Weeks Later: Attitudes Towards COVID-19 Apps for Different Purposes Over TimeProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100427:CSCW2(1-45)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610042
Cheatle AJackson S(2023)(Re)collecting Craft: Reviving Materials, Techniques, and Pedagogies of Craft for Computational MakersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100417:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610041
Caidi NEkmekcioglu CJamali RChandra P(2023)(Re)Capturing the Spirit of Ramadan: Techno-Religious Practices in the Time of COVID-19Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100407:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610040
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten