From the Fair Use Fundamentals infographic, courtesy of Fair Use Week (CC BY).

From the Fair Use Fundamentals infographic (PDF), courtesy of Fair Use Week (CC BY).

Fair Use Week is an annual celebration of the important doctrines of fair use in the United States and fair dealing in Canada and other jurisdictions. With a wealth of events and resources, it’s running February 23-27, 2015.

If you’ve used OpenCourseWare in the past few years, you’ve almost certainly benefited from our application of fair use. It allows us to retain more content, such as images and text excerpts in lecture notes, or media clips within lecture videos, that would otherwise have been cut out prior to our publication.

Since the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare was released at the end of 2009, fair use has led to more complete materials in over 180 OCW courses. That’s over 50% of the courses we’ve published during this time.  Across those courses, you’ll find about 4,000 pieces of content that would NOT be shared with you if not for fair use. And a few of these courses probably would not have been publishable without a fair use foundation.

To learn more about fair use in OpenCourseWare, see our FAQ on fair use.