MIT OpenCourseWare participated in the development of The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare. Fair use can contribute to a richer, more complete educational resource, so it is vital to have a standard set of practices to guide the application of fair use. The document provides support and guidance for publishers of open resources so that they can make their own reasoned and informed judgments about fair use, and it is modeled on prior Codes of Best Practices for Fair Use produced by the Center for Social Media.
A small group of U.S. universities worked with MIT OpenCourseWare, under the guidance of Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi of American University, two experts in the field of copyright law and the application of fair use, to develop a Code of Best Practices specifically tailored to courseware made available from U.S. producers under a Creative Commons license. The authors of this document, the Committee of Practitioners of OpenCourseWare, include participants from MIT, Notre Dame, Yale, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, University of Michigan, and Tufts, in consultation with staff from the Creative Commons ccLearn group. Support was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, with additional funds from the Ford Foundation.