Every 1st of January, the Law and Technology Clinic and Creative Commons Israel celebrate the Public Domain Day. In Israel about 70 years after the death of the author, her works are released to the Public Domain.

This year on the 16 Jan. 2017 CC awesome fund helped us celebrate the Public Domain Day 2017 and Fair Use Week.

The celebration took place at Haifa University Faculty of Law. During the event we presented Creative Commons Licenses and explained about the Public Domain Day. We also talked about Fair Use Week which will take place on the 20-24 Feb. 2017.

What is Fair Use?

Copyright law creates a system of checks and balances that balance between the public domain and the granting of incentive for authors to create. Therefore, the new Israeli Copyright Act of 2007 includes permitted uses. Fair Use is one of them.

The new Israeli Copyright Act of 2007 replaced the old Copyright Act of 1911. The fair dealing clause was replaced by a Fair Use clause which is very much similar to the U.S. Fair Use clause:

“19. Fair Use
(a) Fair use of a work is permitted for purposes such as: private study, research, criticism, review, journalistic reporting, quotation, instruction and examination by an educational institution.
(b) In determining whether a use made of a work is fair within the meaning of this section the factors to be considered shall include, inter alia, all of the following:
(1) The purpose and character of the use;
(2) The character of the work used;
(3) The scope of the use, quantitatively and qualitatively, in relation to the work as a whole;
(4) The impact of the use on the value of the work and its potential market.
(c) The Minister may make regulations prescribing conditions under which a use shall be deemed a fair use”
There is another judicial criterion that has to be met before the use can be considered “fair” – attribution to the author.

However, the fair use clause is unclear and often impossible to say in advance whether a particular use should be considered fair or not.

This year we devoted the celebration to women authors.

Mr. Yair Even-Zohar (Zemereshet Israel) talked about women, authors, and performers whose works and performances are in the public domain. Mrs. Hana Yariv (Wikimedia Israel) talked about women as editors in the Hebrew Wikipedia and about the forgotten women who lack an entry in Wikipedia. The Israeli Creative Commons Coordinator Dalit Ken-Dror Feldman explained about the public domain and about CC Licenses. The Law and Technology Clinic read works that are in the Public Domain and that were written by women – Hannah Szenes, Rachel Bluwstein Sela and Mary Shelley.

It was awesome!!!

All photos via Dalit KD, Creative Commons Israel