Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works by allowing as a defense to copyright infringement claims certain limited uses that might otherwise be considered infringement. Unlike "fair dealing" rights that exist in most countries with a British legal history, the fair use right is a general exception that applies to all different kinds of uses with all types of works and turns on a flexible proportionality test that examines the purpose of the use, the amount used, and the impact on the market of the original work.
Google Books is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.
In United States copyright law, transformative use or transformation is a type of fair use that builds on a copyrighted work in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original, and thus does not infringe its holder's copyright. Transformation is an important issue in deciding whether a use meets the first factor of the fair-use test, and is generally critical for determining whether a use is in fact fair, although no one factor is dispositive.
The Michigan Digitization Project is a project in partnership with Google Books to digitize the entire print collection of the University of Michigan Library. The digitized collection is available through the University of Michigan Library catalog, Mirlyn, the HathiTrust Digital Library, and Google Books. Full-text of works that are out of copyright or in the public domain are available.
Castle Rock Entertainment Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, 150 F.3d 132, was a U.S. copyright infringement case involving the popular American sitcom Seinfeld. Some U.S. copyright law courses use the case to illustrate modern application of the fair use doctrine. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court's summary judgment that the defendant had committed copyright infringement. The decision is noteworthy for classifying Seinfeld trivia not as unprotected facts, but as protectable expression. The court also rejected the defendant's fair use defense finding that any transformative purpose possessed in the derivative work was "slight to non-existent" under the Supreme Court ruling in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994).
HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.
Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, 280 F.3d 934 withdrawn, re-filed at 336 F.3d 811, is a U.S. court case between a commercial photographer and a search engine company. During the case, ownership of Arriba Soft changed to Sorceron, the operator of the Internet search engine Ditto.com. The court found that US search engines may use thumbnails of images, though the issue of inline linking to full size images instead of going to the original site was not resolved.
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191, was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright in the United States because the copies lack originality. Even though accurate reproductions might require a great deal of skill, experience and effort, the key element to determine whether a work is copyrightable under US law is originality.
In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of an original, previously created first work. The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent in form from the first. The transformation, modification or adaptation of the work must be substantial and bear its author's personality sufficiently to be original and thus protected by copyright. Translations, cinematic adaptations and musical arrangements are common types of derivative works.
Fair dealing is a limitation and exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. Fair dealing is found in many of the common law jurisdictions of the Commonwealth of Nations.
The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time limit, and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1928, are in the public domain.
Authors Guild v. Google 721 F.3d 132 was a copyright case heard in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit between 2005 and 2015. The case concerned fair use in copyright law and the transformation of printed copyrighted books into an online searchable database through scanning and digitization. The case centered on the legality of the Google Book Search Library Partner project that had been launched in 2003.
An orphan work is a work whose copyright owner is impossible to identify or contact. This inability to request permission from the copyright owner often means orphan works cannot be used in new works nor digitized, except when fair use exceptions apply. Until recently, public libraries could not distribute orphaned books without risking being fined up to $150,000 if the owner of the copyright were to come forward. This problem was addressed in the 2011 case Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google.
NXIVM Corp. v. The Ross Institute, 364 F.3d 471, was a United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decision that held that the defendant's critical analysis of material obtained in bad faith, i.e., in violation of a non-disclosure agreement, was fair use since the secondary use was transformative as criticism and was not a potential replacement for the original on the market, regardless of how the material was obtained.
Murphy v. Millennium Radio Group LLC is a 2011 U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals case concerning the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), copyright infringement, and defamation with regards to the online posting of a photocopy of a magazine photograph. After New Jersey radio station WKXW 101.5 copied onto its website a magazine picture of two of the station's talk show hosts, Craig Carton and Ray Rossi, the photographer of the picture, Peter Murphy, brought a suit against station owner Millennium Radio Group, as well as Carton and Rossi. The Third Circuit ruled that the station's actions did constitute both a violation of the DMCA and copyright infringement, which vacated the district court's judgment.
Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al., 1:2008cv01425, was a case in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in which three publishers, Cambridge University Press, SAGE Publications, and Oxford University Press, initially filed suit in 2008 against Georgia State University for copyright infringement.
Salinger v. Random House, Inc., 811 F.2d 90 is a United States case on the application of copyright law to unpublished works. In a case about author J. D. Salinger's unpublished letters, the Second Circuit held that the right of an author to control the way in which their work was first published took priority over the right of others to publish extracts or close paraphrases of the work under "fair use". In the case of unpublished letters, the decision was seen as favoring the individual's right to privacy over the public right to information. However, in response to concerns about the implications of this case on scholarship, Congress amended the Copyright Act in 1992 to explicitly allow for fair use in copying unpublished works, adding to 17 U.S.C. 107 the line, "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."
Wright v. Warner Books (1991) was a case in which the widow of the author Richard Wright (1908–1960) claimed that his biographer, the poet and writer Margaret Walker (1915–1998), had infringed copyright by using content from some of Wright's unpublished letters and journals. The court took into account the recent ruling in Salinger v. Random House, Inc. (1987), which had found that a copyright owner had the right to control first publication, but found in favor of Walker after weighing all factors. The case had broad implications by allowing the use of library special collections for academic research.
Civic Chandran v. Ammini Amma is a landmark case in Indian copyright law decided by Kerala High Court in which the judgment held that even substantial copying of copyrighted work is permissible under the fair dealing exception; if the copying is in public interest.
Controlled digital lending (CDL) is a model by which libraries digitize materials in their collection and make them available for lending. It is based on interpretations of the United States copyright principles of fair use and copyright exhaustion.
