OA Footsteps would like to remind all OAF meeting leaders (Zoom & Non Real Time) that OA’s WSO has decided OA entities (meetings, service entities, etc.) cannot screen share or post OA literature other than what is available freely on oa.org.

Further, reading from OA literature in a recording and posting it (to Whatsapp, for instance) is a violation of copyright law. Below, please find some clarification on how much OA literature can be shared, quoted, or read without violating OA’s copyright. This clarification was sent to our Meetings Committee by WSO’s Publications Manager.

The recent bulletin was about online screen sharing OA-owned material, regardless of the format of the OA meeting. Thank you to you and the groups for the care taken by including the OA copyright notice.

I believe that the decision to post 25 words or less may be an interpretation of the US Copyright Offices’ information about the Fair Use Doctrine. Fair Use does not include a word count. (I wish it did. It would make answering questions such as these much easier.)

The best interpretation of fair use I’ve heard (provided by OA”s rights council) is to “reproduce the minimum to make comment about.”

Here are a few other guidelines:
-Keep the excerpt short, in proportion to what you’re extracting from. Again, reproduce the minimum to make a comment about.
-Do not, in effect, reprint an entire OA publication in short excerpts, over time. For example, do not reprint and/or record one page of For Today or Voices of Recovery every day, day after day.
-Do not profit from reprinting the excerpt. (This is usually not a concern within OA, but it is important, so it’s worth listing.)
-It’s also important to cite the original source of the reprint. Please cite the copyright information on all excerpts: “Excerpted from [name of OA literature], © Overeaters Anonymous, Inc. All rights reserved.”

More information about OA’s Copyright as it pertains to our literature. Links will open a new browser window.