Fair Use: “Incredibly Shrinking” or Extraordinarily Expanding?
February 8, 2008

On Friday, February 8, 2008 Columbia Law School hosted a day-long symposium on developments in fair use.

Copyright’s fair use doctrine is evolving in response to today’s challenges, but is it shrinking, or is it expanding? Our panelists looked at recent fair use cases to see how the courts are characterizing and applying the fair use factors, and the potential impact of these trends on the scope of copyright protection. Panelists discussed and debated on:

• Transformative use. The Supreme Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose emphasized the transformative nature of the defendant’s work in evaluating fair use. But what does it mean to “transform” another work? Should the defendant’s work be transformative, for example through “new expression, meaning or message,” or does it suffice for the use to which defendant puts the work to be different from the copyright owner’s uses? What is meant by “functional transformation,” and what are its implications for the right to create derivative works?
  

• The fair use factors. Is the relative weight of the factors changing in the digital world? How significant are the second factor (the nature of the work) and third factor (the amount and substantiality of the portion used) in recent cases? Are there additional factors that courts commonly look to?
  

• Beyond fair use. Other approaches that have been proposed to supplement or further define fair use include “tolerated use” and “lawful personal use.” What do they mean, and what are their implications for authors, rightholders and users?
   

Keynote Speaker
Prof. Paul Goldstein
Stanford Law School

Featuring

Prof. Barton Beebe
Cardozo School of Law
Prof. Laura Heymann
William & Mary School of Law
Robert Kasunic
United States Copyright Office
Prof. Jessica Litman
University of Michigan Law School
Prof. Joseph Liu
Boston College School of Law
Prof. Randal Picker
University of Chicago Law School
Prof. R. Anthony Reese
University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Prof. Rebecca Tushnet
Georgetown University Law Center
Prof. Tim Wu
Columbia Law School

Moderators

June M. Besek
Executive Director, Kernochan Center
Columbia Law School

Prof. Jane Ginsburg
Columbia Law School

Prof. Clarisa Long
Columbia Law School

Sponsors

Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts
The Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts
The Horace Manges Lecture and Conference Fund
The Media Institute
Morrison & Foerster LLP
Viacom
The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI)