Copyright and Fair Use

Animal People, Inc. holds the perpetual non-exclusive right to distribute all content lawfully submitted to the Animal People Forum, in whole or in part, with proper attribution, in any electronic, print, or other medium currently existing or yet to be invented. All other applicable rights remain those of the content creators.

Animal People, Inc. is not responsible for the copyright status of users’ posts to the Animal People Forum message boards or own personal feeds. Images, video clips, sound files, and other media approved for publication in Animal People Forum articles are used with copyright holders’ permission, under a public copyright license (such as Creative Commons), are in the public domain, or are used in accord with the “fair use” doctrine.

Under United States copyright law, the “fair use” doctrine permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving, and scholarship. U.S. courts use the following four factors to determine whether a given instance qualifies as fair use:

  • The purpose and character of the use, including whether it is “transformative” and whether its purpose is commercial or nonprofit/educational
  • The nature of the copyrighted work, and whether it is creative or merely factual
  • The amount or substantiality used in relation to the copyrighted work
  • The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the original

 

The limited use of images, short video and sound clips, and excerpts from copyrighted works on the Animal People Forum meets these factors. It is nonprofit and educational in purpose, uses only a small portion of each copyrighted work, and is unlikely to negatively impact the potential market for or value of the original works, therefore qualifying as fair use under United States copyright law.

Except under the above conditions, Animal People does not knowingly distribute content without permission from its copyright holders. If you believe that your work has been published on the Animal People Forum in violation of copyright, please contact info@animalpeopleforum.org and we will seek to remedy the problem as quickly as possible.