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Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech And How Copying Serves It, Rebecca Tushnet
Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech And How Copying Serves It, Rebecca Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Defenders of transformative uses have invoked the First Amendment to bolster claims that such uses should not be subject to the copyright owner’s permission. But this focus on transformation is critically incomplete, leaving unchallenged much of copyright’s scope, despite the large number of nontransformative copying activities that are also instances of free speech. The current debate leaves the way open for expansions of copyright that, while not targeted at dissenting viewpoints, nonetheless may have a profoundly negative effect on freedom of speech. In other words, transformation has limited our thinking about the free speech interests implicated by copying. This essay …
A Pattern-Oriented Approach To Fair Use, Michael J. Madison
A Pattern-Oriented Approach To Fair Use, Michael J. Madison
Articles
More than 150 years into development of the doctrine of "fair use" in American copyright law, there is no end to legislative, judicial, and academic efforts to rationalize the doctrine. Its codification in the 1976 Copyright Act appears to have contributed to its fragmentation, rather than to its coherence. This Article suggests that fair use is neither badly conceived nor badly applied, but that it is too often badly understood. As did much of copyright law, fair use originated as a judicially-unacknowledged effort via the law to validate certain favored social practices and patterns. In the main, it has continued …
Even More Parodic Than The Real Thing: Parody Lawsuits Revisited, Bruce P. Keller, Rebecca Tushnet
Even More Parodic Than The Real Thing: Parody Lawsuits Revisited, Bruce P. Keller, Rebecca Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
An article focusing on a copyright decision initially may appear out of place in the pages of The Trademark Reporter®. Yet Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that a parodic, transformative use of a copyrighted work, even if commercial, could qualify as a fair use, is quite significant for trademark lawyers. As a practical matter, parody cases increasingly involve copyright as well as trademark claims, so practitioners often encounter both within the same case. As a doctrinal matter, Campbell also has proved legally significant in trademark cases because the free-speech concerns underlying protection for …