Copyright law is a carefully balanced system meant to encourage creativity as well as cultural and scientific progress. The law encourages authors by giving them limited control over certain uses of their works, and it encourages everyone (including authors) to use existing cultural and scientific material without permission, under certain circumstances, to engage in a wide variety of vital activities. Many parts of the law favor the freedom to use culture, but by far and away the most flexible, powerful, and universal user’s right is fair use. As you’ll see below: fair use is a right, fair use is vitally important, fair use is for everyone, and fair uses are everywhere.

Fair Use is a Right

• Some people think fair use is a minor exception or a marginal carve-out from the expansive protection for authors, but fair use is a fundamental right.
• Thanks to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court said fair use is a “First Amendment Safeguard”.
• Like the First Amendment itself, fair use is broad, flexible, and responsive to change. That’s why fair use supports the constitutional purpose of copyright: to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts”.

Fair Use is Vitally Important to

• the economy

  • Experts estimate that industries reliant on fair use contributed $2.4 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2008–2009, or approximately 17 percent of the US GDP.(1):
    • FAIR USE 17%
    • MANUFACTURING 12%
    • AGRICULTURE 1%
    • 6% RETAIL

• to innovation

  • Fair use enables new technologies and advancements, including new products like DVRs and search engines.
• to creativity
  • Without fair use, there would be no parody, no critique and commentary, no transformative mash-ups, and no homage or pastiche.

• to scholarship

  • Imagine trying to prove your brilliant theory about Ernest Hemingway without quoting Hemingway?

Fair Use is for Everybody....Fair Use is Everywhere

Critics say that fair use is unpredictable, technical, legal stuff that the everyday person can’t understand or apply in daily life. In fact, fair uses are all around. Copyright law provides four factors for courts to consider in determining whether a use is fair:

FOUR FAIR USE FACTORS

• The purpose and character of the use
• The nature of the copyrighted work
• The portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
• The effect of the use upon the potential market

The most important factor is the purpose: is the use transformative? Courts are much more likely to uphold a use as fair use if it is transformative, meaning that it adds something new, with a different character, expression, meaning or message, or function.

For more information and additional resources, please visit fairuseweek.org.

• (1)  CCIA, Fair Use in the US Economy, http://www.ccianet.org/wp content/uploads/library/CCIA-FairUseintheUSEconomy-2011.pdf
• 'Fair Use Fundamentals', designed by YIPPA for the Association of Research Libraries, from which this webpart's info. was derived, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License