Today’s Wednesday morning music theory workout had a few teachable moments, but this one was a surprise. We analyzed two pieces of music and at the conclusion, I was greeted with this alert from Instagram. Now, I don’t expect the meta-gears of Facebook and Instagram to stop and debate with me about what constitutes fair use, but the teachable moment here is to discuss what is fair use.
Fair use makes an exception to copyright claims. In other words, if I want to talk about a thing, I should be able to use the thing to talk about the thing. Now, where we draw the line between that and entertaining an audience gets a little stickier.
It may in fact mean that I can no longer share these morning meetings with you on Instagram Live. I’ll look into that, but when you hear the term fair use, it basically means copyrighted material is being used to discuss the copyrighted material. Ironically, that’s kind of meta, isn’t it?
