Law Commons^™

Comment: Sony, Fair Use, And File Sharing, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

In this short Commentary, I would like to explore just one of the interesting strands developed in her paper-the scope of personal fair use in Sony, and its implications for peer-to-peer file sharing. More specifically, I want to reflect on the suggestion that Sony's broad exemption for personal copying has eroded into something unrecognizable, and that it is this erosion-rather than any difference between file-sharing and time shifting-that explains the courts' hostility to the fair use defense in the peer-to-peer context.