Fair Use Ensures That Copyright Protection Is Not Excessively Broad
While copyright owners hold an exclusive monopoly over their works, copyright law maintains that this exclusive monopoly is limited. This limitation manifests in two critical ways. First, authors (creators) are granted exclusive control over their works for a limited time. Second, this exclusive control is not absolute. The public, which benefits from the “intellectual and practical enrichment that results from creative endeavors,”[1] has access to copyrighted works, in certain circumstances, free of charge so to speak. In other words, copyright law allows for some degree of borrowing of copyrighted works without need of permission from, nor payment to, the copyright owner.
Without safe harbors like fair use (and de minimis), copyright protection would be excessively broad and the objectives of copyright law would be stifled. Hence, the fair use doctrine is a guarantee to the public that helps protect against excessively broad copyright protection. In noting this guarantee, Matthew D. Bunker and Clay Calver have stated that fair use “permits courts to avoid rigid application of the copyright statute when, on occasion, it would stifle the very creativity that the law is designed to foster.”[2] And in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, The Supreme Court noted that “the goal of copyright, to promote science and the arts, is generally furthered by the creation of transformative works. Such works thus lie at the heart of the fair use doctrine’s guarantee of breathing space within the confines of copyright…”[3]
Notes:
1 Pierre N. Leval, “Toward a Fair Use Standard,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 103, No.
5 (Mar., 1990), 1109.
2 Matthew D. Bunker & Clay Calvert, “The Jurisprudence Of Transformation: Intellectual
Incoherence And Doctrinal Murkiness Twenty Years After Campbell V. Acuff-Rose Music,”
Duke Law and Technology Review, 2014, 96.
3 Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 579 (1994) (emphasis mine).
