Abstract
Digital communication continues to transform our world, and information is shared continuously faster because of exponential technological advances. For example, due to an immense online audience, many companies now use GIF images containing short movie or song clips to advertise their business on social media. This has apparently been an effective advertising tool.
New information-sharing techniques inevitably birth new copyright implications. Our societal increase in digital communication poses new challenges for copyright jurisprudence and for the courts, because in some instances – such as GIF advertising – it is unclear how current copyright law would distribute certain ownership and usage rights. This Note explores the background and history of US copyright law, including the fair use doctrine, the codification of that doctrine, and the Supreme Court’s development of the ‘transformative use’ doctrine.
The complex ambiguity of the fair use doctrine is discussed at length, which is emphasized by the inconsistent application of the four fair use factors among the federal circuits. Given the impending confrontation between GIFs and copyright holders, as well as the current ambiguity in fair use doctrine, this Note argues in favor of the Seventh Circuit’s return to more traditional copyright values through its appraisal of the ‘market effects’ factor as the most important of the four statutory considerations for determining fair use listed in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Tim Kingsbury, Copyright Paste: The Unfairness of Sticking to Transformative Use in the Digital Age, 2018 University of Illinois Law Review 1471 (Oct 12, 2018).
First posted 2018-10-15 15:04:33
Leave a Reply