Case+03+-+Mr.+Grimrod's+Short+Story+Woes

__Mr. Grimrod’s Short Story Woes__

Mr. Grimrod is a 12th grade English teacher who teaches a CP (College Prep) class. He photocopies two pages of a short story anthology, which is for his students. His purpose is to to introduce the genre of personal anecdote as a short story. He has sought out the story online, but it is out-of-print. The story itself is quite obscure, not appearing in any other anthologies or books. Additionally, it is also nowhere to be found, in any form or fashion, online. Despite the fact that he only copies the first two pages onto a single 8.5” x 11” sheet of copy paper and hopes to study how to open such a piece of writing and how the author uses language of a confessional nature to hook the reader into her tale, Mr. Grimrod still worries he is infringing on the creative rights of the author. The author is now deceased, but presumably has heirs. Mr. Grimrod has approximately 150 students and uses this genre of writing to springboard to other, personal forms of writing. However, the fact that he is making all of these copies concerns him and he is unsure of what Fair Use is and how it is employed in situations such as these.

//Commentary// Using the lens of Fair Use, Mr. Grimrod’s is not so unusual a problem. He is making no money from his copying and is genuinely using the excerpt of the short story for the educational benefit of his students. According to " The Copyright and Fair Use Guidelines for Teachers", teachers may make multiple copies for classroom use. Moreover, he is using only a two-page portion of a 36-page story, so he is using far less than the total piece, far less than even half of the total copyrighted work, and considering that the book has been out-of-print for decades and that it is impossible to purchase (no less in bulk for 150 students), it is safe to assume that the market is not being abused by his copying as the book itself is no longer available on the market. This is a case that most definitely falls into the safe domain of Fair Use. If Mr. Grimrod is still worried about copyright law, then an alternative can be to make overhead transparencies of the work.

Garth Ferrante