Define: Fair Use

Fair Use
Fair Use
Quick Summary of Fair Use

Fair use is a legal principle that allows for the limited use of copyrighted material without obtaining permission from or paying fees to the copyright holder. This doctrine is based on the belief that certain uses of copyrighted works promote creativity, free expression, education, and innovation. Fair use is typically determined on a case-by-case basis and considers factors such as the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect of the use on the potential market for the copyrighted work. While fair use provides flexibility for certain types of uses, it is not a blanket exemption from copyright law and does not negate the need for authorisation in many cases.

What is the dictionary definition of Fair Use?
Dictionary Definition of Fair Use

n. the non-competitive right to use of copyrighted material without giving the author the right to compensation or to sue for infringement of copyright. With the growing use of copy machines, teachers and businesses copy articles, pages of texts, charts and excerpts for classroom use, advice to employees or to assist in research without violating the copyright. For example, Professor Elmer Smedley makes 100 copies of a photograph from Time magazine of starving Somalians to illustrate to his students the deprivations in Africa (which is fair use), but then Smedley publishes a book Africa on the Brink, and uses the photograph in a chapter on starvation (not fair use), and is responsible to the photographer for a royalty.

Full Definition Of Fair Use

Fair use is a doctrine in the United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licenced citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor balancing test. It is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The term “fair use” is unique to the United States; a similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright.

United States trademark law also incorporates a “fair use” defence, which also stems from the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution.

Fair Use Under United States law

The Statute of Anne of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1709 was the first to recognise the legal concept of “copyright.” As room was not made for the authorised reproduction of copyrighted content within this newly formulated statutory right, the courts gradually created a doctrine of “fair abridgement,” which later became “fair use,” that recognised the utility of such actions. The doctrine only existed in the U.S. as common law until it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107, reprinted here:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections and the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonourecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use, the factors to be considered shall include:

  1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes;
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
  3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

The four factors of analysis for fair use set forth above derive from the classic opinion of Joseph Story in Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342 (1841), 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. The court rejected the defendant’s fair use defence with the following explanation:

[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work if his design is really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view not to criticise but to supersede the use of the original work and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.

In short, we must often look to the nature and objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used, and the degree to which the use may prejudice the sale, diminish the profits, or supersede the objects of the original work.

Once these factors were codified as guidelines in USC, they were not rendered exclusive. The section was intended by Congress to restate, but not replace, the prior judge-made law. The courts are still entitled to consider other factors as well.

Fair use tempers copyright’s exclusive rights to serve the purpose of copyright law, which the U.S. Constitution defines as the promotion of “the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (Art. I, § 8, cl. 8). This principle applies particularly well to the case of criticism and also sheds light on various other limitations on copyright’s exclusive rights, particularly the scenes à faire doctrine.

Purpose And Character

The first factor is about whether the use in question helps fulfil the intention of copyright law to stimulate creativity for the enrichment of the general public or whether it aims to only “supersede the objects” of the original for reasons of personal profit. To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new. A key consideration is the extent to which the use is interpreted as transformative as opposed to merely derivative.

When Tom Forsythe appropriated Barbie dolls for his photography project “Food Chain Barbie,” Mattel lost its claims of copyright and trademark infringement against him because his work effectively parodies Barbie and the values she represents. But when Jeff Koons tried to justify his appropriation of Art Rogers’ photograph “Puppies” in his sculpture “String of Puppies” with the same parody defence, he lost because his work was not presented as a parody of Rogers’ photograph in particular but of society at large, which was deemed insufficiently justificatory.

However, since this case, courts have begun to emphasise the first fair use factor—assessing whether the alleged infringement has transformative use as described by Hon. Judge Pierre N. Leval. More recently, Koons was involved in a similar case with commercial photographer Andrea Blanch regarding his use of her photograph for a painting, whereby he appropriated a central portion of an advertisement she had been commissioned to shoot for a magazine. In this case, Koons won; the case sets a favourable precedent for appropriation art where the use is deemed transformative.

The subfactor mentioned in the legislation above, “whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes,” has recently been deemphasized in some circuits “since many, if not most, secondary uses seek at least some measure of commercial gain from their use.” More important is whether the use fulfils any of the “preamble purposes” also mentioned in the legislation above, as these have been interpreted as paradigmatically “transformative.” Although Judge Pierre Leval has distinguished the first factor as “the soul of fair use,” it alone is not determinative. For example, not every educational use is fair.

Nature Of The Copied Work

Although the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the availability of copyright protection should not depend on the artistic quality or merit of a work, fair use analyses consider certain aspects of the work to be relevant, such as whether it is fictional or non-fictional.

To prevent the private ownership of work that rightfully belongs in the public domain, facts and ideas are separate from copyright; only their particular expression or fixation merits such protection. On the other hand, the social usefulness of freely available information can weigh against the appropriateness of copyright for certain fixations. The Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy, for example, was purchased and copyrighted by Time magazine. Yet their copyright was not upheld, in the name of the public interest, when they tried to enjoin the reproduction of stills from the film in a history book on the subject in Time Inc. v. Bernard Geis Associates.

Following the decisions of the Second Circuit in Salinger v. Random House, Inc. and in New Era Publications Int’l v. Henry Holt & Co., whether the copied work has been previously published suddenly trumped all other considerations because of, in the words of one commentator, “the original author’s interest in controlling the circumstances of the first public revelation of his work, and his right, if he so chooses, not to publish at all.” Yet some view this importation of certain aspects of France’s droit moral d’artiste (moral rights of the artist) into American copyright law as “bizarre and contradictory” because it sometimes grants greater protection to works that were created for private purposes that have little to do with the public goals of copyright law than to those works that copyright was initially conceived to protect. This is not to claim that unpublished works, or, more specifically, works not intended for publication, do not deserve legal protection, but that any such protection should come from laws about privacy rather than copyright. The statutory fair use provision was amended in response to these concerns by adding a final sentence: “The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Amount And Substantiality

The third factor assesses the quantity or percentage of the original copyrighted work that has been imported into the new work. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, e.g., a few sentences of a text for a book review, the more likely that the sample will be considered fair use. Yet see Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios for a case in which substantial copying—entire programmes for private viewing—was upheld as fair use. Likewise, see Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, where the Ninth Circuit held that copying an entire photo to use as a thumbnail in online search results did not weigh against fair use “if the secondary user only copies as much as is necessary for his or her intended use.” Conversely, in Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters, the use of fewer than 400 words from President Ford’s memoir by a political opinion magazine was interpreted as infringement because those few words represented “the heart of the book” and were, as such, substantial.

Before 1991, sampling in certain genres of music was accepted practice and such copyright considerations as these were viewed as largely irrelevant. 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. changed practices and opinions overnight. Samples now had to be licenced, as long as they rose “to a level of legally cognizable appropriation.” In other words, de minimis sampling was still considered fair and free because, traditionally, “the law does not care about trifles.” The recent Sixth Circuit Court decision in the appeal to Bridgeport Music has reversed this standing, eliminating the de minimis defence for samples of recorded music but stating that the decision did not apply to fair use.

The Effect Upon Work’s Value

The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner’s ability to exploit his original work. The court not only investigates whether the defendant’s specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner’s market but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the defendant for commercial uses, but on the copyright owner for non-commercial uses. See Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, where the copyright owner, Universal, failed to provide any empirical evidence that the use of Betamax had either reduced their viewership or negatively impacted their business. In the aforementioned Nation case regarding President Ford’s memoirs, the Supreme Court labelled this factor “the single most important element of fair use,” and it has indeed enjoyed some level of primacy in fair use analyses ever since. Yet the Supreme Court’s more recent announcement in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 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.

In evaluating the fourth factor, courts often consider two kinds of harm to the potential market of the original work: First, courts consider whether the use in question acts as a direct market substitute for the original work. In the judgement of the Supreme Court in Acuff-Rose Music, they decisively stated that “when a commercial use amounts to mere duplication of the entirety of the original, it clearly supersedes the object of the original and serves as a market replacement for it, making it likely that cognizable market harm to the original will occur.” In one instance, a court ruled that this factor weighed against a defendant who had made unauthorised movie trailers for video retailers, since his trailers acted as direct substitutes for the copyright owner’s official trailers. Second, courts also consider whether potential market harm might exist beyond that of direct substitution, such as in the potential existence of a licencing market. This consideration has weighed against commercial copy shops that make copies of articles in course-pack for college students when a market already existed for the licencing of course packs.

Courts recognise that certain kinds of market harm do not oppose fair use, such as when a parody or negative review impairs the market of the original work. Copyright considerations may not shield a work against adverse criticism.

Fair Use And Professional Communities

Courts, when deciding fair use cases, in addition to looking at context, amount and value of the use, also look at the standards and practices of the professional communities where the case comes from.

Documentary filmmakers organised and created the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which has had a dramatic effect on fair use practice in documentary film. Since the release of the Statement in 2005, PBS, ITVS and IFC have used it. Furthermore, four out of seven national errors and omissions insurers now issue fair use coverage routinely. Several documentary films have also used it, allowing both theatrical and television releases. Other professional communities are beginning to plan their own best practices and standards in fair use as well.

The Practical Effects Of Fair Use Defence

The practical effect of this law and the court decisions following it is that it is usually possible to quote from a copyrighted work in order to criticise or comment upon it, teach students about it, and possibly for other uses. Certain well-established uses cause few problems. A teacher who prints a few copies of a poem to illustrate a technique will have no problem on all four of the above factors (except possibly on amount and substantiality), but some cases are not so clear. All the factors are considered and balanced in each case: a book reviewer who quotes a paragraph as an example of the author’s style will probably fall under fair use even though he may sell his review commercially. But a non-profit educational website that reproduces whole articles from technical magazines will probably be found to infringe if the publisher can demonstrate that the website affects the market for the magazine, even though the website itself is non-commercial.

Free Republic, LLC, owner of the political website freerepublic.com, was found liable for copyright infringement in L.A. Times v. Free Republic for reproducing and archiving full-text versions of plaintiffs’ news articles, even though the judge found the website minimally commercial. She held that “while defendants’ do not necessarily ‘exploit’ the articles for commercial gain, their posting to the Free Republic site allows defendants and other visitors to avoid paying the ‘customary price’ charged for the works.”

The April 2000 opinion ruled concerning the four factors of fair use that 1) “defendants’ use of plaintiffs’ articles is minimally, if at all, transformative.” 2) the factual content of the articles copied “weighs in favour of finding of fair use of the news articles by defendants in this case,” though it didn’t “provide strong support.” 3) concerning the amount and substantiality prong, “the wholesale copying of plaintiffs’ articles weighs against the finding of fair use,” and 4) the plaintiffs showed that they were trying to exploit the market for viewing their articles online and defendants didn’t rebut their showing by proving an absence of usurpation harm to plaintiffs. Ultimately, the court found “that the defendants may not assert a fair use defence to plaintiffs’ copyright infringement claim.”

Fair Use As A Defence

The Supreme Court of the United States described fair use as an affirmative defence in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. This means that, in litigation on copyright infringement, the defendant bears the burden of raising and proving that his use was “fair” and not an infringement. Thus, fair use need not even be raised as a defence unless the plaintiff first shows (or the defendant concedes) a “prima facie” case of copyright infringement. If the work was not copyrightable, the term had expired, or the defendant’s work borrowed only a small amount, for instance, then the plaintiff cannot make out a prima facie case of infringement, and the defendant need not even raise the fair use defence.

Because of the defendant’s burden of proof, some copyright owners frequently make claims of infringement even in circumstances where the fair use defence would likely succeed in hopes that the user will refrain from the use rather than spending resources in his defence. This type of frivolous lawsuit is part of a much larger problem in First Amendment law; see Strategic lawsuit against public participation.

Because paying a royalty fee may be much less expensive than having a potential copyright suit threaten the publication of a completed work in which a publisher has invested significant resources, many authors may seek a licence even for uses that copyright law ostensibly permits without liability.

The frequent argument over whether fair use is a “right” or a “defence” is generated by confusion over the use of the term “affirmative defence.” An affirmative defence is simply a term of art from litigation reflecting the timing in which the defence is raised. It does not distinguish between “rights” and “defences,” and so it does not characterise the substance of the defendant’s actions as “not a right but a defence.” The First Amendment, for instance, is generally raised as an affirmative defence in litigation but is clearly a “right.” Similarly, while fair use is characterised as a defence in terms of the litigation posture, Section 107 defines fair use as a “limitation” on copyright law and states clearly that “the fair use of a copyrighted work… is not an infringement of copyright.”

In response to perceived over-expansion of copyrights, several electronic civil liberties and free expression organisations began in the 1990s to add fair use cases to their dockets and concerns. These include the Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”), the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the American Library Association, numerous clinical programmes at law schools, and others. The “Chilling Effects” archive was established in 2002 as a coalition of several law school clinics and the EFF to document the use of cease-and-desist letters. Most recently, 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.

The Economic Benefit Of Fair Use

A balanced copyright law provides an economic benefit to many high-tech businesses, such as search engines and software developers, and fair use is also crucial to non-technology industries such as insurance, legal services, and newspaper publishers. On September 12, 2007, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a group representing companies including Google Inc., Microsoft Inc., Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, and other high-tech companies, released a study that found that fair use exceptions to US copyright laws were responsible for more than $4,500 billion in annual revenue for the United States economy, representing one-sixth of the total U.S. GDP. The study was conducted using a methodology developed by the World Intellectual Property Organization. The study found that fair use-dependent industries are directly responsible for more than 18% of U.S. economic growth and nearly 11 million American jobs. “As the United States economy becomes increasingly knowledge-based, the concept of fair use can no longer be discussed and legislated in the abstract. It is the very foundation of the digital age and a cornerstone of our economy,” said Ed Black, President and CEO of CCIA. “Much of the unprecedented economic growth of the past ten years can actually be credited to the doctrine of fair use, as the Internet itself depends on the ability to use content in a limited and non-licenced manner.”

Fair Use And Parody

Producers or creators of parodies of a copyrighted work have been sued for infringement by the targets of their ridicule, even though such use may be protected as fair use. The fair use cases addressing parodies distinguish between parodies—using a work in order to poke fun at or comment on the work itself—and satires—using a work to poke fun at or comment on something else. Courts have been more willing to grant fair use protections to parodies than to satires, but the ultimate outcome in either circumstance will depend on the application of the four fair use factors.

In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., the Supreme Court recognised parody as a fair use, even when done for profit. Roy Orbison’s publisher, Acuff-Rose Music Inc., had sued 2 Live Crew in 1989 for their use of Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” in a mocking rap version with altered lyrics. 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 used for mere advertising, commercial sale did not bar the defence. The Campbell Court also distinguished parodies from satire, which they described as a broader social critique not intrinsically tied to ridicule of a specific work and so not deserving of the same use exceptions as parody because the satirist’s ideas are capable of expression without the use of the other particular work.

A number of appellate decisions have recognised parody as a protected fair use, including both the Second (Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp.) and Ninth Circuits (Mattel v. Walking Mountain Productions). Most recently, in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin, a suit was brought unsuccessfully against the publication of The Wind Done Gone, which reused many of the characters and situations from Gone with the Wind but told the events from the point of view of the slaves rather than the slaveholders. The Eleventh Circuit, applying Campbell, recognised that The Wind Done Gone was a protected parody and vacated the district court’s injunction against its publication.

Fair Use On The Internet

A US court case in 2003, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, provides and develops the relationship between thumbnails, inline linking and fair use. In the lower District Court case on a motion for summary judgement, Arriba Soft was found to have violated copyright without a fair use defence in the use of thumbnail pictures and inline linking from Kelly’s website in Arriba’s image search engine. That decision was appealed and contested by Internet rights activists such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argued that it was clearly covered under fair use.

On appeal, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found in favour of the defendant. In reaching its decision, the court utilised the above-mentioned four-factor analysis. 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 like the original artwork was. Second, the fact that the photographs had already been published diminished the significance of their nature as creative works. Third, although normally making a “full” replication of a copyrighted work may appear to violate copyright, here it was found to be reasonable and necessary in light of the intended use. Lastly, the court found that the market for the original photographs would not be substantially diminished by the creation of the thumbnails. To the contrary, the thumbnail searches could increase exposure of the originals. In looking at all these factors as a whole, the court found that the thumbnails were fair use and remanded the case to the lower court for trial after issuing a revised opinion on July 7, 2003. The remaining issues were resolved with a default judgement after Arriba Soft experienced significant financial problems and failed to reach a negotiated settlement.

Common Misunderstandings

Because of the deliberate ambiguity of fair use, it is commonly misunderstood. Here are some of the more common misunderstandings with explanations of why they are wrong:

  • Any use that seems fair is fair use. In the law, the term “fair use” has a specific meaning that only partly overlaps the plain-English meaning of the words. While judges have much leeway in deciding how to apply fair use guidelines, not every use that is commonly considered “fair” counts as fair use under the law.
  • Fair use interpretations, once made, are static forever. Fair use is decided on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the entirety of the circumstances. The same act done by different means or for a different purpose can gain or lose fair use status. Even repeating an identical act at a different point in time can make a difference due to changing social, technological, or other surrounding circumstances.
  • If it’s not fair use, it’s copyright infringement. Fair use is only one of many limitations, exceptions, and defences to copyright infringement. For instance, the Audio Home Recording Act establishes that it is legal in some circumstances to make copies of audio recordings for non-commercial personal use.
  • It’s copyrighted, so it can’t be fair use. On the contrary, fair use applies only to copyrighted works, describing conditions under which copyrighted material may be used without permission. If a work is not copyrighted, fair use does not come into play since public-domain works can legally be used for any purpose.
    • Note: In some countries (including the United States of America), the mere creation of a work establishes copyright over it, and there is no legal requirement to register or declare copyright ownership.
  • Acknowledgement of the source makes the use fair. Giving the name of the photographer or author may help, but it is not sufficient on its own. While plagiarism and copyright violation are related matters—both can, at times, involve failure to properly credit sources—they are not identical. Copyright law protects exact expression, not ideas; for example, a distant paraphrase that lays out the same argument as a copyrighted essay is in little danger of being deemed a copyright violation, but it could still be plagiarism. On the other hand, one can plagiarize even a work that is not protected by copyright, such as trying to pass off a line from Shakespeare as your own. Plagiarism—using someone’s words, ideas, images, etc. without acknowledgement—is a matter of professional ethics. Copyright is a matter of law. Citing sources generally prevents accusations of plagiarism but is not a sufficient defence against copyright violations (otherwise, anyone could legally reprint an entire copyrighted book just by citing who wrote it).
  • Non-commercial use is invariably fair. Not true, though a judge may take the profit motive or lack thereof into account.
  • Strict adherence to fair use protects you from being sued. Fair use is a defence against an infringement suit; it does not restrain anyone from suing. The copyright holder may legitimately disagree that a given use is fair, and they have the right to have the matter decided by a court. This means that fair use is not really a deterrent to SLAPP.
  • The lack of a copyright notice means the work is in the public domain. Not usually true. United States law in effect since March 1, 1989, has made copyright the default for newly created works. For a recent work to be in the public domain, the author must specifically opt out of copyright. For works produced between January 1, 1923, and March 1, 1989, copyright notice is required; however, registration was not required, and between January 1, 1978, and March 1, 1989, a lack of notice is not necessarily determinative if attempts are made immediately to correct the lack of notice. Any American work that did not have formal registration or notice fell into the public domain if registration was not made in a timely fashion. For international works, the situation is even more complex. International authors who failed to provide copyright notice or register with the U.S. copyright office are given additional contemporary remedies that may restore American copyright protection, given certain conditions. International authors and corporations that fail to meet these remedies forfeit their copyright. An example of a company that failed to prove copyright was Roland Corporation and their claimed copyright on the sounds contained in their MT-32 synthesiser.
  • It’s okay to quote up to 300 words. The 300-word limit is reported to be an unofficial agreement, now long obsolete, among permissions editors in the New York publishing houses: ‘I’ll let you copy 300 words from our books if you let us copy 300 words from yours.’ It runs counter to the substantiality standard. As explained above, the substantiality of the copying is more important than the actual amount. For instance, copying a complete short poem is more substantial than copying a random paragraph of a novel; copying an 8.5×11-inch photo is more substantial than copying a square foot of an 8×10-foot painting. In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a news article’s quotation of approximately 300 words from former President Gerald Ford’s 200,000-word memoir was sufficient to constitute an infringement of the exclusive publication right in the work.
  • You can deny fair use by including a disclaimer. Fair use is a right granted to the public on all copyrighted work. Fair use rights take precedence over the author’s interest. Thus, the copyright holder cannot use a non-binding disclaimer or notification to revoke the right to fair use of works. However, binding agreements, such as contracts or licence agreements, may take precedence over fair use rights.
  • If you’re copying an entire work, it’s not fair use. While copying an entire work may make it harder to justify the amount and substantiality test, it doesn’t make it impossible. For instance, in the Betamax case, it was ruled that copying a complete television show for time-shifting purposes is fair use.
  • If you’re selling for profit, it’s not fair use. While commercial copying for-profit work may make it harder to qualify as fair use, it doesn’t make it impossible. For instance, in the 2 Live Crew—Oh, Pretty Woman case, it was ruled that commercial parody can be fair use.

Influence

The doctrine of fair use is no longer exclusive to the United States, with other jurisdictions having either implemented such a doctrine or considering its introduction.

Fair Use In Israel

In November 2007, Israel passed a new Copyright Law that included a US-style fair use exception. 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. The law sets up four factors to determine whether a use is fair use.

International Situation

While influential in some quarters, other countries often have drastically different fair use criteria to the US, and in some countries, there is little or no fair use defence available. Even within Europe, rules vary greatly between countries. Some countries have the concept of fair dealing instead of fair use.

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This site contains general legal information but does not constitute professional legal advice for your particular situation. Persuing this glossary does not create an attorney-client or legal adviser relationship. If you have specific questions, please consult a qualified attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

This glossary post was last updated: 9th April 2024.

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