A Tale of Two Seusses and Argued Fair Uses: The Fact-Specific Nature of Copyright Fair Use

摘要

Fair use in the copyright context is fact specific and can be frustratingly inconsistent to litigants. Perhaps the best illustration of the challenge of predicting the outcome of a fair use analysis is the opposite holdings of two courts considering whether commercial use of content from Dr. Seuss' well-known children's books was fair.~1 The fair use doctrine is now firmly rooted in statute, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 107. The Copyright Act considers certain uses of copyrighted works "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research" as non-infringing, based on an analysis and weighing of four, non-exclusive factors.~2 This provision was included to alleviate concerns that'"excessively broad [copyright] protection would stifle, rather than advance, the law's objective,' [and so] fair use doctrine 'mediates between"the property rights [copyright law] established in creative works, which must be protected up to a point, and the ability of authors, artists, and the rest of us to express them-or ourselves by reference to the works of others, which must be protected up to a point.'"~3.