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For Day 3 of Fair Use Week, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the current state of fair use and sampling in music, especially (but not uniquely!) in hip hop.

"Audible Captions is not a book of any kind," Audible writes in court filing.

Fair use in copyright law is an enormously complex legal doctrine.  Although much scholarly attention has been paid to fair use in the context of teaching -- particularly in on-line education -- relatively little research exists on the problem of fair use in scholarship. This article analyzes reported federal cases on fair use in scholarly contexts, with a particular emphasis on the transformative use doctrine that has become enormously influential in fair use determinations. The article explores insights from this body of case law that may assist future scholars wishing to fairly use copyrighted expression in their scholarship.

Explainer.

This paper is about how libraries can legally lend digital copies of books. It explains the legal and policy rationales for the process— “controlled digital lending”— as well as a variety of risk factors and practical considerations that can guide libraries seeking to implement such lending.  We write this paper in support of the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending,  a document endorsed by many libraries, librarians, and legal experts.  Our goal is to help libraries and their lawyers become more comfortable with the concept by more fully explaining the legal rationale for controlled digital lending, as well as situations in which this rationale is the strongest.

As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, we have seen an increase in examples of AI systems reflecting or exacerbating societal bias, fro

Case could turn on whether Boldly is a parody or an homage.

Game company wants to take down YouTube star’s livestreams after n-word incident.

After nearly a decade in court, a Nevada judge decides that producers, writers and the director of the hit musical fairly used an unpublished biography.

Last November, a crowd-funded Star Trek project got sued for copyright and trademark infringement by a major rights holder. No, not Axanar!  That was the previous year, silly (although the Axanar l…

The problems of getting permissions.

On behalf of three national library associations, EFF today urged a federal appeals court for the second time to protect librarians’ and students’ rights to make fair use of excerpts from academic

I made a discovery just before the holidays. If you start Beyoncé’s “Grown Woman” at 0:23 seconds in and simultaneously press play on the music video...

An art historian wins a fair use victory, with the help of the College Art Association’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use and a publisher that appreciates it.  When Rebekah Modrak, Associate Profes

One could be forgiven for thinking of the “Dancing Baby” case as a thing of the past.  It seems a long time ago that a district court affirmed that the music heard in the background (for only 29 seconds) of a video in which Stephanie Lenz’s baby is dancing — the music was Prince’s “Let’s … Continue reading Ignore fair use at your peril! →

Litigants in court cases often disagree sharply about the law and its application to the facts, so it is probably not a surprise that the briefs filed in the District Court’s re-examination of its ruling in the Georgia State copyright infringement trial should see the issues in such starkly different terms. If you read the … Continue reading Can this gulf be bridged? →