Captioning Hypnotoad—A Quest That Helped Define a Field: An Interview with Sean Zdenek

Fair Use & Accessibility

Working with captions, especially closed captions, can raise issues around ownership and fair use. One of the best discussions of these issues, and impacts for captioners and caption researchers, is Blake Reid's (2014) white paper, Third Party Captioning and Copyright for G3ict. (A recording of a webinar on the same topic with Blake Reid, 2015, with a transcript, is hosted by 3Play Media online.) Fortunately, just as Zdenek has provided multiple approaches to researching closed captions as well as frameworks for viewing and analyzing captions, his efforts in publishing his findings have also supplied current and future caption studies researchers with Fair Use and Accessibility statement templates to use in their research.

Fair Use in this Webtext

The author, Gregory Zobel, is a U.S.-based scholar who studies and publishes in the areas of web accessibility and educational technology. Dr. Zobel also draws for guidance on questions of fair use on the Center for Media and Social Impact's codes of best practices for fair use.

This webtext follows Zdenek's approach to fair use in caption research. Thus readers are directed to the statement below. This is quoted nearly verbatim, with alterations for the context of this webtext, from his Fair Use Notice.

Fair Use Notice

The videos in this webtext are transformative works used in good faith, in keeping with Section 107 of U.S. copyright law, and as such constitute fair use of copyrighted material.

According to Section 107 of U.S. copyright law, "the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." The copyrighted materials included in this webtext are used for all of these purposes, with the exception of news reporting.

Every use of copyrighted material on this site adheres to the following principles of fair use:

• Shows good faith by attributing authorship to the original owner or the major distributor (e.g., Hulu) where the full movie can be viewed or purchased;
• Borrows an appropriate amount of material from the original, only what is sufficient (and no more) to put the example under critical, scholarly scrutiny;
• Transforms the original material by reappropriating it for different, always scholarly, purposes. Such transformations may take the form of a re-edited movie clip/mashup or a significant written critique;
• Uses copyrighted material for illustration purposes. Using copyrighted examples for illustration purposes is necessary when commenting on and critiquing the accessibility of multimedia (one of the subjects of this webtext);
• Aims to launch discussions of vital issues to Web accessibility experts, closed caption users, new media students and scholars, and anyone interested in the intersection of rhetoric, new media, and accessibility;
• Does not seek in any way to profit commercially. This webtext is intended as a resource of ideas and examples of the author's research, scholarship, and teaching.