Carrie on Copyright

Carrie Russell, the American Library Association's copyright specialist, will answer selected questions from readers. Send questions to prx-slj@reedbusiness.com, with 'copyright' in the subject line. Note: Carrie's comments are not to be considered legal advice.

Each month, our library shares ideas for story time. For our flannel-board stories, we often take the text of a picture book and paraphrase or shorten it. Then we type a script and pass out copies for other librarians to use in their story times. Are we violating any copyright laws? Janis Getty, Library Assistant Arlington Heights (IL) Memorial Library

This is a fascinating question that actually involves three exclusive rights of the copyright holder: the right to create derivative works and, to a lesser extent, the right to distribute and the right to publicly perform a work. You and your colleagues are creating a new work based on the original, then distributing copies, and reading aloud the new work before a group. Should you ask permission of the copyright holder to exercise these rights, or can you proceed under 'fair use'?

To refresh your memory, fair use (section 107 of the copyright law) says that copyright can be infringed in certain instances because strict application of the law would unduly restrict creativity, research, and learning. Four factors are used to determine if a use is fair: (1) purpose of the use (nonprofit, educational, or for profit); (2) nature of the work (published vs. unpublished, creative or factual); (3) amount of the work being used; and (4) the effect on the market.

An entire issue of SLJ could be devoted to an in-depth analysis of this case, but briefly, I suggest that this is a fair use and not a violation of the copyright law. The librarian, while not employed in a formal education setting, like a classroom, is working in a nonprofit library. She does not tell stories to children for a profit (factor one above). The work being used, while creative in nature, is published (factor two). I am assuming that small pieces of the work are being modified (factor three). And finally, the copyrighted work has been lawfully purchased. The creation of the new work and its use by a few librarians does not interfere with the copyright holder's exploitation of the original work, nor does it prevent the copyright holder from exploiting the work in new ways (factor four).