Fair use
The 1710 Statute of Anne, an act of the Parliament of Great Britain, created copyright law to replace a system of private ordering enforced by the Stationers' Company.
In response to perceived over-expansion of copyrights, several electronic civil liberties and free expression organizations began in the 1990s to add fair use cases to their dockets and concerns.
In 2006 Stanford University began an initiative called the "Fair Use Project" (FUP) to help artists, particularly filmmakers, fight lawsuits brought against them by large corporations.
Examples of fair use in United States copyright law include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship.
[9]The four factors of analysis for fair use set forth above derive from the opinion of Joseph Story in Folsom v. Marsh,[6] in which the defendant had copied 353 pages from the plaintiff's 12-volume biography of George Washington in order to produce a separate two-volume work of his own.
In an earlier case, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., the Supreme Court had stated that "every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively ...
In Campbell, the court clarified that this is not a "hard evidentiary presumption" and that even the tendency that commercial purpose will "weigh against a finding of fair use ... will vary with the context."
For instance, in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises,[26] the U.S. Supreme Court held that a news article's quotation of fewer than 400 words from President Ford's 200,000-word memoir was sufficient to make the third fair use factor weigh against the defendants, because the portion taken was the "heart of the work".
Yet the Supreme Court's more recent announcement in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc[13] that "all [four factors] are to be explored, and the results weighed together, in light of the purposes of copyright" has helped modulate this emphasis in interpretation.
Google used the APIs' definition and their structure, sequence and organization (SSO) in creating the Android operating system to support the mobile device market.
With the help of an intellectual property lawyer, the creators of Loose Change successfully argued that a majority of the footage used was for historical purposes and was significantly transformed in the context of the film.
First, it found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative, noting that they were not meant to be viewed at high resolution as the original artwork was.
The remaining issues were resolved with a default judgment after Arriba Soft had experienced significant financial problems and failed to reach a negotiated settlement.
In June 2011, Judge Philip Pro of the District of Nevada ruled in Righthaven v. Hoehn that the posting of an entire editorial article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a comment as part of an online discussion was unarguably fair use.
The strict decision against rapper Biz Markie's appropriation of a Gilbert O'Sullivan song in the case Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc.[47] changed practices and opinions overnight.
However, three years later, the Sixth Circuit effectively eliminated the de minimis doctrine in the Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films case, holding that artists must "get a license or do not sample".
The Supreme Court viewed 2 Live Crew's version as a ridiculing commentary on the earlier work, and ruled that when the parody was itself the product rather than mere advertising, commercial nature did not bar the defense.
A number of appellate decisions have recognized that a parody may be a protected fair use, including the Second (Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp.); the Ninth (Mattel v. Walking Mountain Productions); and the Eleventh Circuits (Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co.).
This view was substantiated by the rulings of Judge Denny Chin in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., a case involving mass digitisation of millions of books from research library collections.
Judge Harold Baer, in finding that the defendant's uses were transformative, stated that 'the search capabilities of the [HathiTrust Digital Library] have already given rise to new methods of academic inquiry such as text mining.
"[53][54] There is a substantial body of fair use law regarding reverse engineering of computer software, hardware, network protocols, encryption and access control systems.
This compilation includes fair use provisions from Bangladesh, Israel, South Korea, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Uganda, and the United States.
The law, which took effect in May 2008, permits the fair use of copyrighted works for purposes such as private study, research, criticism, review, news reporting, quotation, or instruction or testing by an educational institution.
[65] On September 2, 2009, the Tel Aviv District court ruled in The Football Association Premier League Ltd. v. Ploni[66] that fair use is a user right.
In doing so, the court analyzed the four fair use factors adopted in 2007 and cited U.S. case law, including Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. and Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc..[67] An amendment in 2012 to the section 13(2)(a) of the Copyright Act 1987 created an exception called 'fair dealing' which is not restricted in its purpose.
Finally, Polish law treats all cases in which private material was made public as a potential copyright infringement, where fair use can apply, but has to be proven by reasonable circumstances.
[79] On September 12, 2007, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA),[79] a group representing companies including Google Inc., Microsoft Inc.,[80] Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!
[81] and other high-tech companies, released a study that found that fair use exceptions to US copyright laws were responsible for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States economy representing one-sixth of the total US GDP.
[79] The study found that fair use dependent industries are directly responsible for more than eighteen percent of US economic growth and nearly eleven million American jobs.
[85] ARL also launched an official Fair Use Week website, which was transferred from Pia Hunter, who attended the Library Code of Best Practices Capstone Event and had originally purchased the domain name fairuseweek.org.
