We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Lawyers, scholars, and activists, including EFF, often highlight Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Section 230 (originally of the Communications Decency Act) as the legal foundations of the internet. But there’s another, much older, doctrine that’s at least as important: Fair use, which dates back many decades and it codified in law as Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Fair use is, in essence, the right of the public to use a copyrighted work in a variety of circumstances, without the rightsholder’s permission. It’s why a reviewer can quote from the book they’re reviewing, a parody video can include excerpts from a movie, and security researchers can copy a software program in order to test it for malware.
Fair use is essential to internet for at least two reasons. First, the vast majority of what we do online, from email to texting to viewing images and making TikToks, involves creating, replicating, and/or repurposing copyrighted works. Since copyright is a limited but lengthy monopoly over those works, in theory, using or even viewing them might require a license; now, and for many decades in the future.
Second, technological innovation rarely means starting from scratch. Instead, developers build on existing technologies, hopefully improving them. But if the technology in question involves code, it is likely copyrightable. If so, that add-on innovation might require a license from the rightsholder, giving them a veto right on technological development.
As digital technologies dramatically (and sometime controversially) expand the reach of copyright, fair use helps ensure that the rights of the public expand as well.
Examples abound. In 2021, for example, the Supreme Court This article has been indexed from Deeplinks
Read the original article: