What Is Fair Use?

Posted by Unimarks on November 6th, 2019

Copyrights laws work for the safety and security of the work the author or the producer from being infringed. But the only place where these laws don’t help the makers are when the others use their work under “fair use”. For those who are not familiar of this verse, this is the usage of the author’s copyrighted work via fair use does not allow any copying of the already copyrighted done work for a limited and transformative purpose, such as online or criticism at any platform, or the parody of the copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without any knowledge and approval from the copyright owner himself. In other words, fair use is a strong defense against the copyright infringement claim. If the user is qualified as fair use, then it will not be considered to infringe on the copyright laws of the holder. In this article and the few articles to come you will get to know what this fair use is, and the laws associated with it.

The policy behind copyright law is not exactly that simply to protect the rights of those who the content is produced, but in order to promote the progress in the field science and modern useful arts, the law in default allows the authors of the work to enforce their copyrights laws in all cases which would actually hamper, first it was appealed in the courts and then in lawmakers adopted the fair use doctrine in order to permit the usage of the copyrighted materials considering the benefits of the work to society, many of which are also entitled to be in the copyrights act. Fair use will not permit if you are to merely copy another man’s work and flourish profit from it, but when your use the contributes work to society by continuing the public discourse or creating new work from its old process, fair use will then protect you from the copyrights law.

Section 107 of the Copyright Act which defines all fair use boundaries are as follows:

–> The fair use of a copyrighted work, including the use by the reproduction of the copies of the phonorecords or by any other means which are specified by each section, for the sole purpose of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching which also include multiple copies for a classroom education, scholarship, or research, which are also not an infringement of the copyrights law. Determining whether the work is made on the bases of any particular case is a fair use the factor to be taken into consideration.

–> The purpose and characters of use which includes whether such use is for a commercial purpose or is for a nonprofitable or an educational purposes; 

–> At what nature the copyrighted work comes under and if they infringe is also used in a form to make a profit or belittle the original author or producer; 

–> The amount and substantiality of the portion which is used in relation to the copyrighted work as the whole; 

–> the effective use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work.

–> Unfortunately, there is no clear formula that you can use to determine the boundaries of fair use. Instead, a court will weigh these four factors holistically in order to determine whether the use in question is fair use. In order for you to assess whether your use of another’s copyrighted work will be permitted, you will need an understanding of why fair use applies, and how courts interpret each part of the test.

Practical Tips for Avoiding Copyright Liability

While there are not many definitive tests for determining whether your use of an already copyrighted work is fair use, there are several things you can do to formally minimize your risk if the copyright liability:

–> Use only very limited content from the copyrighted work as it is necessary to accomplish your purpose or to convey your message;

–> Use it in such a way that it is extremely clear that your purpose is to strictly commentary, news reporting, or criticism;

–> Add something new for your own benefit (don’t copy, improvise);

–> If your source is not specifically nonfiction, just stick with copying the facts and data from the work you’re trying to take data from; 

–> Seek out for the Creative Commons or the other freely licensed work which when in such a substitution could be made and then respect the attributions requests in these works.

Source : http://www.unimarkslegal.com/laws-rights/what-fair-use-copyrights/