What Is Fair Work?

The first supreme court case that impacted fair use was Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984). In Sony Corp. of America, owners of copyrights on television programs brought infringement actions against manufacturers of home videotape recorders. The Court argued that the situations in which fair use most commonly recognized are found in the statute itself; when a work is used “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, ... scholarship, or research.” These uses reflect a common theme of work that was productive, which resulted in an added benefit to the public beyond the first author’s original work. The court argued that in order to find fair use one must depend upon the facts of
Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994)., a registered song protected by copyright challenged the argument of fair use when an artist created a parody of the original song. The court in Campbell added the element of a work being “transformative” when evaluating the first factor. The examination of the first factor emphases whether the new work only supersedes the matters of the original work, “…or whether and to what extent it is “transformative,” altering the original with new expression, meaning, or message.” The court set out that the more transformative the new work, the less significant the other factors will be in finding of fair use. Though transformative use is not essential for a finding of fair use, the goal of copyright, to promote science and the arts, is generally promoted by the formation of transformative
Prince., 714 F.3d 694 (2d Cir. 2013). evaluated fair use. A photographer brought copyright infringement action against an artist, gallery, and gallery owner based on the artist's use of photographer's copyrighted photographs of in paintings that were marketed and sold by the gallery and owner. The courts were aware that the more transformative the secondary work, the less likely the secondary work would substitute the original, even though the fair use, being transformative, might have harmed, or even destroyed, the market for the original. The commercial/nonprofit difference concerned the unfairness that arises when a secondary user made an unauthorized use of copyrighted material to capture significant revenue as a direct consequence of copying the original work.” The court concluded that when an accused infringing use had taken the place in the market of the copyrighted works, including the derivative market, where the infringer's target audience and the content was the same as the original, that was not fair