FairUseBot

Inspiration

We came up with this idea after realizing a common issue — creators, students and professionals alike being unsure and especially careful when using online content for projects or videos due to copyright and fair use. We realized that many people either misinterpret fair use or unknowingly violate copyright laws because they are unable to find the proper resources to check. Our chatbot aims to address this issue by providing quick, accessible, and tailored legal advice on fair use, while also helping users discover Creative Commons or public domain resources they can use legally in their projects, including audio files, fair use analysis, ethical considerations, and practical advice.

What it does

FairUseBot is an AI-powered legal assistant specialized in copyright and fair use issues. Unlike generic AI tools, it offers: Role-based personalization - Legal advice tailored to your specific needs as a student, influencer, nonprofit organization, or artist Practical alternatives - Direct access to free-to-use content via Openverse integration, providing immediate solutions rather than just information Ethical guidance - Beyond just legal compliance, helping users understand the ethical dimensions of content usage Citation assistance - Generating proper attribution for content when needed The platform delivers this through a conversational interface that makes complex legal concepts accessible to everyone. Users simply select their role, ask questions in natural language, and receive both legal guidance and practical resource recommendations in seconds. This directly addresses the Creative Industries & Ethical Content Use track by democratizing access to legal guidance while promoting ethical content practices and responsible digital citizenship.

How we built it

Our brainstorming process began with understanding the core problem of fair use confusion and how we could address it. We divided the work into clear tasks: Researching fair use guidelines and creating a knowledge base for the chatbot. Integrating the Gemini API for generating responses based on user queries and developing a backend via FastAPI. Developing a feature to search for Creative Commons resources via Openverse and check MLA, APA, and Chicago citation guides when necessary. Designing the user interface to be intuitive and interactive. We started with basic functionality (handling queries and providing a simple response) and then iterated by adding user role customization to specialize the bot’s abilities between students, influencers, artists and more. Later, we worked on enhancing the chatbot’s conversational abilities and ensuring it was responsive to various user inputs. For example, we added a feature that would be able to create citations if the query included links.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was integrating the Gemini API for generating context-aware responses. The model’s responses had to be both legally accurate and tailored to different user roles, which required extensive fine-tuning and testing. We also faced difficulty in sourcing and formatting the free-to-use content from Openverse, as we needed to ensure that the results were both relevant and properly presented in the chat. To deal with these challenges, we spent extra time refining the prompt for the Gemini API and used a careful selection process for Openverse results, ensuring that the media we recommended was both relevant and legally compliant. We also built an error-handling mechanism for situations where content couldn't be found or when the model misinterpreted the user's query.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the customized advice system that tailors responses based on the user's role, as well as the integration of free-to-use content recommendations. The combination of legal advice with practical resources like Creative Commons content makes FairUseBot both a useful and unique tool. We are also proud of our implementation of the citation feature where it cites given links or forms of media. Additionally, the smooth interaction design that allows users to ask questions naturally and receive informative answers gives us great pride.

What we learned

Leah worked together with Zachary on the backend where they worked on and learned about API integration with Gemini and Openverse, query parsing and chatbot response optimization to ensure accurate and legally sound answers, link/media citation formatting for clean and user-friendly content delivery, and prompt engineering to fine-tune the bot's responses across different user roles and question types Wendi focused on the frontend where they learned to build an interactive interface with a smooth user experience. They worked on adding new features such as conversation threads on the left side for starting new chats, created a toggle system for selecting user roles (student, influencer, nonprofit, etc.), and implemented a search bar for quickly browsing pre-set prompts Nicole took the lead on ideation and feature development, where they learned about how to prompt engineer for optimal responses, conducted research on fair use law, ethics, and copyright best practices, and proposed the integration of copyright-free audio files through Openverse to offer practical alternatives to copyrighted content.

What's next for our Project

Next, we plan to scale FairUseBot by expanding the range of free-to-use resources it can find, beyond just audio, to include images, videos, and other media types. We also want to incorporate a broader database of legal resources to provide even more comprehensive advice on fair use. Additionally, we’re working on developing a more sophisticated AI model that can handle more complex queries, such as those involving mixed-use content (e.g., content that is part copyrighted, part open-source). For instance, determining whether it's ethical to prompt a chatbot to generate an image in the style of Studio Ghibli raises complex legal and moral questions that would require deeper research and consideration. We also plan to enhance its accessibility by introducing a mobile version and integrating it into popular platforms like social media or educational websites, making it available to a wider audience.

Built With

• api
• dotenv
• fastapi
• gemini
• html/css
• javascript
• openverse