Laura Quilter

Author: Laura Q

  • test faq

    Section 110(1): You can play it in class!

    Section 110 is one of numerous copyright exceptions (17 USC 107 – 121) and it provides a special, extremely straightforward right to perform works in classrooms. This includes screening films, acting out plays, playing music, displaying photographs & works of art. 

    This handout explains the basics about Section 110(1), including common hypotheticals. This FAQ is not legal advice about your particular situation. If you have questions about Section 110, please reach out to your liaison librarian or to copyright@umass.edu. 

    The language of the statute (17 USC 110(1)):

    Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:

    (1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made;

    ANSWERS about Section 110(1): 

    • Can students make use of Section 110(1) to play films in class? 
      YES!        “instructors or pupils”

       

    • Does it have to be in a classroom?
      NO!       “classroom or similar place devoted to instruction”. Arguably, any place that a lecture or seminar could be held would be appropriate–so, meeting rooms, event spaces, public spaces, etc.

     

    • Does it have to be a registered class?
      NO!       The Copyright Act specifies “face-to-face teaching activities”, so long as they are “of” the University, are fine. So panels and programs by units of the University are covered! 

       

    • What about student programs?
      Maybe?       If it is “of” a nonprofit educational institution — if the student program is part of or sponsored by the University, then yes!

       

    • Can the public be invited?
      Sure!       As long as there are “teaching activities”, and the screening is “by” instructors or pupils, the statute does not prohibit the public.

       

    • What about charging admission?
      Probably not.       The statute doesn’t address it, but admission charges are probably not in keeping with “teaching activities” of a “nonprofit educational institution”.

       

    • Can a class act out a play? 
      YES!       “Performance of a work” includes plays (“dramatic works”)

       

    • What about playing music? 
      YES!       “Performance of a work” includes music and sound recordings

       

    • What about online or distance ed? 
      NO, not under Section 110(1)      , which specifies “face-to-face teaching activities … in a classroom or similar place.” The next provision, Subsection 110(2) (the “TEACH Act”), sets out slightly different rules for online or distance ed, most importantly including requirements that screening films may be limited to “reasonable and limited portions”, and that the performance should be streamed or otherwise protected from downloads. Fair use (Section 107) may also be applicable. 

       

    • Do we have to have “public performance rights” to use Section 110(1)? 
      NO!       That’s the whole point of this provision — an exception from needing to purchase PPRs for public performances for these kinds of screenings. Other kinds of screenings — for instance, if you want to screen a film for entertainment purposes, or a member of the public is screening it, or there are no teaching activities, or if it is not on campus — then PPRs are probably appropriate.

       

       

    • Does Section 110(1) protect private performances for a small group of friends?
      Section 110(1) is NOT NEEDED for “private” performances      , because only “public performances” are governed by the Copyright Act. Private performances for a small group of friends are not governed under the Copyright Act at all. “Public performance” means (1) open to the public or at any place where “substantial number” of people outside family and friend group, or (2) public transmissions or broadcasts. (17 USC 110)

       

    • Do films have to be educational or documentary?
      NO! So, could I screen “Star Wars”? YES!       As long as there are “teaching activities”, you can absolutely screen any “work” — even the poppiest of pop cultural works.

       

    • Can instructors screen works from Netflix, Amazon.com, Hulu, Disney Plus, YouTube, Kanopy, or any other streaming provider?
      That depends!        Specifically, it depends on the license that the instructor or their institution signs with the streaming provider. Unfortunately, most major streamers (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney) do not offer institutional licenses for campuses, which means their licenses are usually for “personal use”. The Libraries license Kanopy and other educational services for use on campus. Also, most publicly available YouTube, Vimeo, and Internet Archive videos are licensed for public performance–but you should check the license to know for sure. 

       

    • Can a school’s PTO have a “movie night” for fun or fundraising?
      NO,       not under Section 110(1). They may need to get public performance rights (a “license”).

       

    • Are there other weird public performance rights?
      Absolutely!       In addition to Section 110(1), other sections offer protections for distance education (110(2)), churches and religious music (110(3)), small cafes (110(5)), agricultural fairs (110(6)), music stores (110(7)), library book-readings and even fundraising events using “nondramatic literary or musical works” (110(7)), disability-related book readings (110(8)), veteran and fraternal organizations (but not campus greek organizations) (110(10)), and last but not least, expurgating the naughty bits of movies (110(11)). 

  • academic journals RIP?

    My colleague Lisa DV posted a link to “In Memoriam: The Academic Journal” on an internal AI chat —

    In this piece we reflect on the life and influence of AJ, the academic journal, charting their history and contributions to science, discussing how their influence changed society and how, in death, they will be mourned for what they once stood for but for which, in the end, they had moved so far from that they will less missed than they might have been.

    — & it fomented some conversation. Some conversation centered on the utility or lack thereof of AI to research, & how it could be useful, & how even if it’s useful in some use cases, it still poses potentially insuperable problems to the existing scholarly publishing ecosystem.

    I summed up my take thusly:

    The Academic Journals RIP piece is cute. But the bigger problem is not academic journals (which as I’ve said if they die, I won’t be mourning) but the research enterprise. So long as academics’ life outcomes — their salary & financial well-being & their healthcare & so forth — are all dependent on research outputs, there will be incentives among academics to cheat. Indeed, just as there are incentives among students to cheat for grades, credit, & the eventual certification that a degree offers, allowing access to higher-level salaries and so forth. There’s been lots of pre-AI cheating putting strain on the system for a while — from data fudging (hence the replicability crisis) to citation rings to splitting papers into “minimum publishable units”. And plenty of exploitation of these motives by publishers. AI might super-charge these problems, but if so, it’s just going to make more apparent the existing dysfunction. 

    Perhaps it’s worth spelling out that this is all a predictable consequence of the capture of scholarly research by capitalist business interests, from publishers to tech transfer office activities to …. on and on. 

    If we want intellectual advancement, we need to disentangle it from “the research enterprise” anyhow. The current incentives are very messed up. 

    I played a bit of a dirty trick (unintentionally!) on my colleagues by posting that (to which they reacted) & then editing to add this:

    Relatedly — I’ve been playing w/ Claude code over the past couple of weeks, and it’s been helpful in both (a) advancing a project, and (b) helping me master some new skills. A friend blogged about his experiences w/ people like me (maybe me included) here: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2026/01/07/ai-psychosis-ai-apotheosis/

    and I thought he had some good points: 

    “I don’t think you get power by asking for it, and only rarely get it by demanding it. In the world of technological empowerment, you get it by stealing it.”

    Posting here in furtherance of my goal to reboot my brain with daily (or at least more frequent) creativity practice….

  • reading …

    • Blake Reid, Copyright Office proposed legislation
    • working on Supabase
    • developing my jolabokeflod, the family tradition we had before we knew there was an (Icelandic) word for it
    • oral arguments in Cox v. Sony
    • We the People by Jill Lepore (audiobook while I commute….)

  • modern snake oil

    This is more of a placeholder than a thought-out note, but reading about

    • (a) today’s Supreme Court oral arguments in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin (can New Jersey regulate deceptive advertising by anti-abortion clinics?) (Yes, I know there are broader civil liberties issues here raised by the breadth of the subpoenas (see Mother Jones article for a quick summary) but we know (a) the larger effect of the decision and (b) why the conservatives on the Court were interested in this case.)
    • (b) the 2nd Circuit’s decision yesterday allowing “crisis pregnancy centers” to sell “abortion reversal” treatments (Nat’l Inst. of Family & Life Advocates et al v. Letitia James (2d Cir. Dec. 1, 2025), and
    • (c) the various “we can sell conversion therapy” cases (too upsetting for me to dig up the links right now….),

    in the continued backdrop of the efforts to (a) raise “commercial speech” to levels of protection accorded political speech, and (b) our country’s continued adherence to treating healthcare as a commodity ….

    … I can’t help but see some weird SF futures. Like Edgar Pangborn’s Davy but without the post-apocalypse. Or with the wacky aburdities of Rudy Rucker’s futures written in the law.

  • a use case for G-AI

    I’ve been tinkering with chatgpt, Claude, & similar, for the past couple of years, mostly for self-education — how do they work, what are they good for? — and occasionally to actually try to get something out of one of them, also in a partially self-educational mode.

    Before today, it hadn’t been … hugely successful.

    My most annoying & story-worthy incident came when I was prepping a talk about the Establishment Clause, and I wanted to write about how the Supreme Court had effectively killed off the Lemon test, without explicitly overruling it. I had a great idea for a graphic! A little gravestone with Lemon v. Kurtzman on it …. I asked chatgpt to make this for me … and it lectured me about how it couldn’t threaten anyone with violence. We went back and forth and back and forth and I got some graphics that really did not meet the need. Anyway, I made my point in class that night about Lemon, and an extra point about gen-AI.

    One of my first experiments was also trying to prompt for graphics — I wanted a mermaid with an alligator tail instead of a fish tail — and was definitely not able to get that. In retrospect, I should have just asked Freddie Baer to collage something for me, because that was definitely what I was visualizing ….

    Most frequently, I’ve used these tools to generate ideas or outlines or talking points, and then used those as — well, as negative counters from which I could, shaking my head and rolling my eyes, write my own that was better. Well, more to my needs. No, better.

    But! Today I actually, truly, used a gen-AI tool for something and it was helpful!

    Necessary backstory: A few years ago, when my university dropped BePress & BePress simultaneously dropped their “expert gallery” or “selected works” product, I failed to export my list of 50+ talks, submissions, papers, etc. I didn’t care, because (see last post) my focus, energy, and fucks to give have been blowing out into vacuum for several years.

    But, I figured out quickly that I really did not want to have to recreate that list — even though it was 10 years out of date & so therefore just a snapshot of a few years’ worth of stuff.

    My colleague helpfully send me the bepress dump, which was nested folders of xml files & the original PDF uploads.

    But now I was faced with my utter inability to effectively muck about with xml & re-generate the humanly readable bibliographic data.

    Voilà! Chatgpt to the rescue. I had it analyze the zip file & convert it into a .ris file, then imported the whole thing into Zotero. Then I was able to easily dig out the relevant citations & add to the “writings” section here. Behold the fruits of my labor!

    Now I am preening because I Learned a Thing. Not, you know, xml parsing or atom or even ris formats. But a use case for ChatGPT that was actually effective.

  • … Freddie

    My friend Freddie Baer died on November 12 of this year — two Wednesdays ago.

    I’ve been processing it ever since, in various ways. Helping organize some of the stuff in her house. Helping digitize & archive her many works, and setting up a website for that (https://freddiebaer.com/). Writing various announcements. Obviously, looking back through my journals & photos, & talking about her, sharing her with others in my life, & co-conspiratorating w/ Liz Henry, among others. Dreaming, even, that I was talking with her, in her house, about her work & her death…

    All this reflecting and processing has helped push me further into a reawakening. For almost five years, I’ve been immersed in one reality — focusing just on one thing, putting everything else in autopilot. I often described my brain like a spaceship that has had a hull breach — everything is blowing out into the vacuum of space, and anybody in the ship is just clinging desperately to whatever they can find. Part of my brain is focusing on the latest copyright news, my work at UMass, the fight against fascism, native plants, puzzles, etc. — but all those interests are just clinging desperately against the pull of the vacuum.

    But over the last year or so, I’ve started tiptoeing back into the world — traveling for a reunion with friends in Minneapolis, visiting family in the Bay Area, reaching out to old friends — visiting Freddie in Eureka.

    And I’m realizing I need to reclaim the parts of me that have been put on hold — the parts that are still clinging, and maybe some parts that have been spaced. And I need to fix the freaking hull breach, somehow.

    So.

    Writing has been one way I’ve organized myself over the years, and it’s readily accessible, and affords some discipline. I have no grand ambitions for this blog — “notes” captures where I’m doing.