CIPIL Intellectual Property Seminar Series: 'Fair Use Best Practices for Higher Education Institutions: The Israeli Experience'

Speaker: Dr Orit Fischman Afori

The fair use doctrine involves a high degree of uncertainty which discourages users from exploiting copyrighted works in ways that the law seeks to promote. To address this uncertainty and its chilling effect in the field of higher education we drafted a Code of Fair Use Best Practices relating to the use of copyrighted materials in Higher Education Institutions in Israel. We formed a coalition of all the higher education institutions in Israel and together we formulated a shared understanding of fair use among the partner institutions. The initiative was inspired by similar projects in the U.S. We also carefully examined the lessons from the failure of past American projects, such as CONFU. We thus had ample source material for a comparative analysis of copyright law, fair use, and the different strategies of legal activism for social change.

The presentation will provide a snapshot of the process of building the coalition and drafting the Code of Fair Use Best Practices, and discuss some of its potential consequences.

Location: Room G11, Faculty of Law.

Dr Orit Fischman Afori’s main fields of research are intellectual property law in general and copyright law in particular. Her publications in the area of intellectual property law focus on copyright, industrial designs and cultural rights as human rights.

Dr Fischman Afori is an Associate Professor at The Haim Striks School of Law, College of Management Academic Studies, Israel and is visiting CIPIL as an official Faculty Visitor from January to August 2013. Her research topic will be: Open Standards in Copyright Law: Evolution towards a Unified Theory.

A sandwich lunch will be provided.