116-397: A Creative Commons ( CC ) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of
232-687: A prima facie case can be defeated without relying on fair use. For instance, the Audio Home Recording Act establishes that it is legal, using certain technologies, to make copies of audio recordings for non-commercial personal use. Some copyright owners claim infringement even in circumstances where the fair use defense would likely succeed, in hopes that the user will refrain from the use rather than spending resources in their defense. Strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) cases that allege copyright infringement, patent infringement, defamation, or libel may come into conflict with
348-481: A copyleft license. Libre licenses without share-alike terms are sometimes called permissive licenses . The Creative Commons public copyright license suite includes licenses with attribution, share-alike, non-commercial and no-derivatives conditions. It also offers a public domain license and the Founders' Copyright license. Open supplement licenses permit derivatives of the work (specifically material that supplements
464-479: A thumbnail in online search results did not even weigh against fair use, "if the secondary user only copies as much as is necessary for his or her intended use". However, even the use of a small percentage of a work can make the third factor unfavorable to the defendant, because the "substantiality" of the portion used is considered in addition to the amount used. For instance, in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises ,
580-669: A " Freeware " license model; examples are The White Chamber , Mari0 or Assault Cube . Despite the status of CC0 as the most free copyright license, the Free Software Foundation does not recommend releasing software into the public domain using the CC0 due to patent concerns. However, application of a Creative Commons license may not modify the rights allowed by fair use or fair dealing or exert restrictions which violate copyright exceptions. Furthermore, Creative Commons licenses are non-exclusive and non-revocable. Any work or copies of
696-408: A Fair Use Standard . Blanch v. Koons is another example of a fair use case that focused on transformativeness. In 2006, Jeff Koons used a photograph taken by commercial photographer Andrea Blanch in a collage painting. Koons appropriated a central portion of an advertisement she had been commissioned to shoot for a magazine. Koons prevailed in part because his use was found transformative under
812-572: A U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001. There have also been five versions of the suite of licenses, numbered 1.0 through 4.0. Released in November 2013, the 4.0 license suite is the most current. While the Creative Commons license was originally grounded in the American legal system, there are now several Creative Commons jurisdiction ports which accommodate international laws. In October 2014,
928-552: A URL leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one picture, depicting 15-year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church, caused some controversy when she sued Virgin Mobile. The photo was taken by Alison's church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license. In 2008, the case (concerning personality rights rather than copyright as such)
1044-473: A compatible license, and making reference and attribution to the original license (e.g. by referring to the URL of the original license). The license is non-exclusive, royalty-free, and unrestricted in terms of territory and duration, so it is irrevocable, unless a new license is granted by the author after the work has been significantly modified. Any use of the work that is not covered by other copyright rules triggers
1160-423: A fair use defense would likely succeed. The simple reason is that the license terms negotiated with the copyright owner may be much less expensive than defending against a copyright suit, or having the mere possibility of a lawsuit threaten the publication of a work in which a publisher has invested significant resources. Fair use rights take precedence over the author's interest. Thus the copyright holder cannot use
1276-451: A given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work. There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. Each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002, by Creative Commons ,
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#17330932625571392-563: A list of FSF-approved software licenses and free documentation licenses. The Open Source Initiative keeps a similar list of OSI-approved software licenses. The Open Knowledge Foundation has a list of OKFN-approved licenses for content and data licensing. The implied license imposed by the Berne Convention , and the public domain (the CC0 license as waiver ), are the references for any other public license. Considering all cultural works, as in
1508-491: A message," and that he was not "trying to create anything with a new meaning or a new message." However, the artist's intended message "is not dispositive." Instead, the focus of the transformative use inquiry is how the artworks will "reasonably be perceived". The transformativeness inquiry is a deceptively simple test to determine whether a new work has a different purpose and character from an original work. However, courts have not been consistent in deciding whether something
1624-600: A negotiated settlement. In August 2008, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the Northern District of California ruled in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. that copyright holders cannot order a deletion of an online file without determining whether that posting reflected "fair use" of the copyrighted material. The case involved Stephanie Lenz, a writer and editor from Gallitzin, Pennsylvania , who made a home video of her thirteen-month-old son dancing to Prince's song " Let's Go Crazy " and posted
1740-448: A non-binding disclaimer, or notification, to revoke the right of fair use on works. However, binding agreements such as contracts or licence agreements may take precedence over fair use rights. The practical effect of the fair use doctrine is that a number of conventional uses of copyrighted works are not considered infringing. For instance, quoting from a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment upon it or teach students about it,
1856-506: A non-profit educational website that reproduces whole articles from technical magazines will probably be found to infringe if the publisher can demonstrate that the website affects the market for the magazine, even though the website itself is non-commercial. Fair use is decided on a case-by-case basis, on the entirety of circumstances. The same act done by different means or for a different purpose can gain or lose fair use status. The Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case revolves around
1972-550: A number of content directories and search engines. After being proposed by Creative Commons in 2017, Creative Commons license symbols were added to Unicode with version 13.0 in 2020. The circle with an equal sign (meaning no derivatives ) is present in older versions of Unicode, unlike all the other symbols. meaning no derivatives meaning no rights reserved meaning share alike meaning non-commercial meaning Creative Commons license Public copyright license A public license or public copyright license
2088-546: A public copyright license does not limit licensors either. Under this definition, license contract texts specific to a single licensor (like the UK government’s Open Government License, which would have to be edited to be used by other licensors) are not considered public copyright licenses, although they may qualify as open licenses. Some organisations approve public copyright licenses that meet certain criteria, in particular being free or open licenses. The Free Software Foundation keeps
2204-399: A public copyright license must allow licensees to share and adapt the licensed work for any purpose, including commercial ones. Licenses that purport to release a work into the public domain are a type of libre license. Share-alike licenses require derivatives of the licensed work to be released under the same license as the original. When a libre license has a share-alike term, it is called
2320-434: A separate two-volume work of his own. The court rejected the defendant's fair use defense with the following explanation: [A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede
2436-552: A similar defense. However, the Court in the case at bar rejected the idea that file-sharing is fair use. A U.S. court case from 2003, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. , provides and develops the relationship between thumbnails , inline linking , and fair use. In the lower District Court case on a motion for summary judgment , Arriba Soft's use of thumbnail pictures and inline linking from Kelly's website in Arriba Soft's image search engine
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#17330932625572552-722: A use from being found fair, even though it makes it less likely. Likewise, the noncommercial purpose of a use makes it more likely to be found a fair use, but it does not make it a fair use automatically. For instance, in L.A. Times v. Free Republic , the court found that the noncommercial use of Los Angeles Times content by the Free Republic website was not fair use, since it allowed the public to obtain material at no cost that they would otherwise pay for. Richard Story similarly ruled in Code Revision Commission and State of Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org , Inc. that despite
2668-472: A work against adverse criticism. As explained by Judge Leval, courts are permitted to include additional factors in their analysis. One such factor is acknowledgement of the copyrighted source. Giving the name of the photographer or author may help, but it does not automatically make a use fair. While plagiarism and copyright infringement are related matters, they are not identical. Plagiarism (using someone's words, ideas, images, etc. without acknowledgment)
2784-540: A work does not bar a finding of fair use. It simply makes the third factor less favorable to the defendant. For instance, in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. copying entire television programs for private viewing was upheld as fair use, at least when the copying is done for the purposes of time-shifting . In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation , the Ninth Circuit held that copying an entire photo to use as
2900-430: Is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law. Some public licenses, such as
3016-451: Is a general exception that applies to all different kinds of uses with all types of works. In the U.S., fair use right/exception is based on a flexible proportionality test that examines the purpose of the use, the amount used, and the impact on the market of the original work. The doctrine of "fair use" originated in common law during the 18th and 19th centuries as a way of preventing copyright law from being too rigidly applied and "stifling
3132-434: Is a matter of professional ethics, while copyright is a matter of law, and protects exact expression, not ideas. One can plagiarize even a work that is not protected by copyright, for example by passing off a line from Shakespeare as one's own. Conversely, attribution prevents accusations of plagiarism, but it does not prevent infringement of copyright. For example, reprinting a copyrighted book without permission, while citing
3248-545: Is also governed by copyright law and CC licenses are applicable, the CC recommends against using it in software specifically due to backward-compatibility limitations with existing commonly used software licenses. Instead, developers may resort to use more software-friendly free and open-source software (FOSS) software licenses . Outside the FOSS licensing use case for software there are several usage examples to utilize CC licenses to specify
3364-531: Is classified as an 'affirmative defense,' we hold—for the purposes of the DMCA—fair use is uniquely situated in copyright law so as to be treated differently than traditional affirmative defenses. We conclude that because 17 U.S.C. § 107 created a type of non-infringing use, fair use is "authorized by the law" and a copyright holder must consider the existence of fair use before sending a takedown notification under § 512(c)." In June 2011, Judge Philip Pro of
3480-504: Is considered a fair use. Certain well-established uses cause few problems. A teacher who prints a few copies of a poem to illustrate a technique will have no problem on all four of the above factors (except possibly on amount and substantiality), but some cases are not so clear. All the factors are considered and balanced in each case: a book reviewer who quotes a paragraph as an example of the author's style will probably fall under fair use even though they may sell their review commercially; but
3596-514: Is convinced that the defendant prevents communication of works whose management is entrusted to the plaintiff [SGAE], using a repertoire of authors who have not assigned the exploitation of their rights to the SGAE, having at its disposal a database for that purpose and so it is manifested both by the legal representative of the Association and by Manuela Villa Acosta, in charge of the cultural programming of
Creative Commons license - Misplaced Pages Continue
3712-572: Is problematic. This is achieved by a public domain waiver statement and a fall-back all- permissive license . The Unlicense , published around 2010, has a focus on an anti-copyright message. The Unlicense offers a public domain waiver text with a fall-back public domain-like license inspired by permissive licenses but without attribution. Fair use Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from
3828-543: Is speculation that media creators often lack insight to be able to choose the license which best meets their intent in applying it. Some works licensed using Creative Commons licenses have been involved in several court cases. Creative Commons itself was not a party to any of these cases; they only involved licensors or licensees of Creative Commons licenses. When the cases went as far as decisions by judges (that is, they were not dismissed for lack of jurisdiction or were not settled privately out of court), they have all validated
3944-458: Is the extent to which the use is transformative . In the 1994 decision Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc , the U.S. Supreme Court held that when the purpose of the use is transformative, this makes the first factor more likely to favor fair use. Before the Campbell decision, federal Judge Pierre Leval argued that transformativeness is central to the fair use analysis in his 1990 article, Toward
4060-617: Is transformative. For instance, in Seltzer v. Green Day, Inc., 725 F.3d 1170 (9th Cir. 2013), the court found that Green Day's use of Seltzer's copyrighted Scream Icon was transformative. The court held that Green Day's modifications to the original Scream Icon conveyed new information and aesthetics from the original piece. Conversely, the Second Circuit came to the opposite conclusion in a similar situation in Andy Warhol Foundation for
4176-577: Is undisputed that Hoehn posted the entire work in his comment on the Website. ... wholesale copying does not preclude a finding of fair use. ... there is no genuine issue of material fact that Hoehn's use of the Work was fair and summary judgment is appropriate." On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Righthaven did not even have the standing needed to sue Hoehn for copyright infringement in
4292-556: The BSD License , the GNU LGPL , and the GNU GPL . Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses and five are not. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "ND" and "SA" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses. Of the eleven valid combinations, the five that lack
4408-625: The District of Nevada ruled in Righthaven v. Hoehn that the posting of an entire editorial article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a comment as part of an online discussion was unarguably fair use. Judge Pro noted that "Noncommercial, nonprofit use is presumptively fair. ... Hoehn posted the Work as part of an online discussion. ... This purpose is consistent with comment, for which 17 U.S.C. § 107 provides fair use protection. ... It
4524-568: The GNU GPL and the CC BY-SA , are also considered free or open copyright licenses . However, other public licenses like the CC BY-NC are not open licenses, because they contain restrictions on commercial or other types of use. Public copyright licenses do not limit their licensees. In other words, any person can take advantage of the license. The former Creative Commons (CC) Developing Nations License
4640-459: The Open Definition , the four freedoms summarizes the main differences: The "open licenses" preserve the main freedoms of CC0, but add some reasonable restriction. Labeling by its acronyms, the main restrictions are: Free licenses are a popular subset of public copyright licenses. They include free and open source software licenses and free content licenses. To qualify as a libre license,
4756-674: The Open Knowledge Foundation approved the Creative Commons CC ;BY, CC BY-SA and CC0 licenses as conformant with the " Open Definition " for content and data. Lawrence Lessig and Eric Eldred designed the Creative Commons License (CCL) in 2001 because they saw a need for a license between the existing modes of copyright and public domain status. Version 1.0 of the licenses was officially released on 16 December 2002. The CCL allows inventors to keep
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4872-501: The "BY" clause have been retired because 98% of licensors requested attribution, though they do remain available for reference on the website. This leaves six regularly used licenses plus the CC0 public domain declaration. The six licenses in most frequent use are shown in the following table. Among them, those accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation – the public domain dedication and two attribution (BY and BY-SA) licenses – allow
4988-695: The 1990s to add fair use cases to their dockets and concerns. These include the Electronic Frontier Foundation ("EFF"), the American Civil Liberties Union , the National Coalition Against Censorship , the American Library Association , numerous clinical programs at law schools, and others. The " Chilling Effects " archive was established in 2002 as a coalition of several law school clinics and
5104-559: The Chinese government adapted the Creative Commons License to the Chinese context, replacing the individual monetary compensation of U.S. copyright law with incentives to Chinese innovators to innovate as a social contribution. Work licensed under a Creative Commons license is governed by applicable copyright law. This allows Creative Commons licenses to be applied to all work falling under copyright, including: books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites. While software
5220-535: The Copyright Act of 1976, which is codified at 17 U.S.C. § 107 . They were intended by Congress to clarify rather than to replace, the prior judge-made law. As Judge Pierre N. Leval has written, the statute does not "define or explain [fair use's] contours or objectives." While it "leav[es] open the possibility that other factors may bear on the question, the statute identifies none." That is, courts are entitled to consider other factors in addition to
5336-556: The Dutch CC license and director of the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, commented, "The Dutch Court's decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and binds users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of
5452-525: The EFF to document the use of cease and desist letters. In 2006 Stanford University began an initiative called the " Fair Use Project " (FUP) to help artists, particularly filmmakers, fight lawsuits brought against them by large corporations. Examples of fair use in United States copyright law include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody , news reporting, research, and scholarship. Fair use provides for
5568-477: The Free Software Foundation currently does not recommend using CC0 to release software into the public domain because it explicitly does not grant a patent license. In February 2012, CC0 was submitted to Open Source Initiative (OSI) for their approval. However, controversy arose over its clause which excluded from the scope of the license any relevant patents held by the copyright holder. This clause
5684-609: The Parliament of Great Britain, created copyright law to replace a system of private ordering enforced by the Stationers' Company . The Statute of Anne did not provide for legal unauthorized use of material protected by copyright. In Gyles v Wilcox , the Court of Chancery established the doctrine of "fair abridgement", which permitted unauthorized abridgement of copyrighted works under certain circumstances. Over time, this doctrine evolved into
5800-488: The Second Circuit in Cariou v. Prince , 714 F.3d 694 (2d. Cir. 2013) shed light on how transformative use is determined. "What is critical is how the work in question appears to the reasonable observer, not simply what an artist might say about a particular piece or body of work." The district court's conclusion that Prince's work was not transformative is partly based on Prince's deposition testimony that he "do[es]n't really have
5916-493: The U.S. Supreme Court held that a news article's quotation of fewer than 400 words from President Ford 's 200,000-word memoir was sufficient to make the third fair use factor weigh against the defendants, because the portion taken was the "heart of the work". This use was ultimately found not to be fair. The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work. The court not only investigates whether
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#17330932625576032-466: The U.S. are located in a different section of the statute. A similar-sounding principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions but in fact it is more similar in principle to the enumerated exceptions found under civil law systems. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright. In response to perceived over-expansion of copyrights, several electronic civil liberties and free expression organizations began in
6148-445: The U.S. legal system in mind; therefore, the wording may be incompatible with local legislation in other jurisdictions , rendering the licenses unenforceable there. To address this issue, Creative Commons asked its affiliates to translate the various licenses to reflect local laws in a process called " porting ". As of July 2011, Creative Commons licenses have been ported to over 50 jurisdictions worldwide. Working with Creative Commons,
6264-596: The Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 11 F.4th 26 (2d. Cir. 2021). In that case, the Warhol Foundation sought a declaratory judgment that Warhol's use of one of Goldsmith's celebrity photographs was fair use. The court held that Warhol's use was not transformative because Warhol merely imposed his own style on Goldsmith's photograph and retained the photograph's essential elements. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that
6380-570: The artist) into American copyright law as "bizarre and contradictory" because it sometimes grants greater protection to works that were created for private purposes that have little to do with the public goals of copyright law, than to those works that copyright was initially conceived to protect. This is not to claim that unpublished works, or, more specifically, works not intended for publication, do not deserve legal protection, but that any such protection should come from laws about privacy, rather than laws about copyright. The statutory fair use provision
6496-480: The association, which is compatible with the alternative character of the Association and its integration in the movement called ' copy left '. On June 30, 2010, GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit against That is Great News. GateHouse Media owns a number of local newspapers, including Rockford Register Star , which is based in Rockford, Illinois. That is Great News makes plaques out of newspaper articles and sells them to
6612-560: The author and the license and added a link to the original. Langner was later contacted by the Verband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet (VGSE) (Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property in the Internet) with a demand for €2300 for failing to provide the full name of the work, the full name of the author, the license text, and a source link, as is required by the fine print in
6728-434: The availability of copyright protection should not depend on the artistic quality or merit of a work, fair use analyses consider certain aspects of the work to be relevant, such as whether it is fictional or non-fictional. To prevent the private ownership of work that rightfully belongs in the public domain, facts and ideas are not protected by copyright —only their particular expression or fixation merits such protection. On
6844-429: The case matter was narrowed down to whether Google's use of the definition and SSO of Oracle's Java APIs (determined to be copyrightable) was within fair use. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against Google, stating that while Google could defend its use in the nature of the copyrighted work, its use was not transformative, and more significantly, it commercially harmed Oracle as they were also seeking entry to
6960-469: The case on that count, ruling that the atlas was not a derivative work of the photograph in the sense of the license, but rather a collective work . Since the atlas was not a derivative work of the photograph, Kappa Map Group did not need to license the entire atlas under the CC BY-SA 2.0 license. The judge also determined that the work had been properly attributed. In particular, the judge determined that it
7076-549: The collecting society's claims because the owner of the bar proved that the music he was using was not managed by the society. In February 2006, the Cultural Association Ladinamo (based in Madrid, and represented by Javier de la Cueva ) was granted the use of copyleft music in their public activities. The sentence said: Admitting the existence of music equipment, a joint evaluation of the evidence practiced, this court
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#17330932625577192-495: The copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works by allowing as a defense to copyright infringement claims certain limited uses that might otherwise be considered infringement. The U.S. "fair use doctrine" is generally broader than the " fair dealing " rights known in most countries that inherited English Common Law . The fair use right
7308-406: The court clarified that this is not a "hard evidentiary presumption" and that even the tendency that commercial purpose will "weigh against a finding of fair use ... will vary with the context." The Campbell court held that hip-hop group 2 Live Crew 's parody of the song " Oh, Pretty Woman " was fair use, even though the parody was sold for profit. Thus, having a commercial purpose does not preclude
7424-457: The creation of the thumbnails. To the contrary, the thumbnail searches could increase the exposure of the originals. In looking at all these factors as a whole, the court found that the thumbnails were fair use and remanded the case to the lower court for trial after issuing a revised opinion on July 7, 2003. The remaining issues were resolved with a default judgment after Arriba Soft had experienced significant financial problems and failed to reach
7540-454: The defendant's right to freedom of speech , and that possibility has prompted some jurisdictions to pass anti-SLAPP legislation that raises the plaintiff's burdens and risk. Although fair use ostensibly permits certain uses without liability, many content creators and publishers try to avoid a potential court battle by seeking a legally unnecessary license from copyright owners for any use of non-public domain material, even in situations where
7656-474: The defendant's specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's market, but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the infringement on commercial use of the work. For example, in Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios , the copyright owner, Universal , failed to provide any empirical evidence that
7772-450: The entertainment industry. This prompted him to invoke the fair use doctrine, which permits limited use of copyrighted material to provide analysis and criticism of published works. In 2009, fair use appeared as a defense in lawsuits against filesharing . Charles Nesson argued that file-sharing qualifies as fair use in his defense of alleged filesharer Joel Tenenbaum . Kiwi Camara , defending alleged filesharer Jammie Thomas , announced
7888-641: The entire atlas. Drauglis sued the defendants in June 2014 for copyright infringement and license breach, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, fees, and costs. Drauglis asserted, among other things, that Kappa Map Group "exceeded the scope of the License because defendant did not publish the Atlas under a license with the same or similar terms as those under which the Photograph was originally licensed." The judge dismissed
8004-662: The fact that it is a non-profit and did not sell the work, the service profited from its unauthorized publication of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated because of "the attention, recognition, and contributions" it received in association with the work. Another factor is whether the use fulfills any of the preamble purposes, also mentioned in the legislation above, as these have been interpreted as "illustrative" of transformative use. In determining that Prince's appropriation art could constitute fair use and that many of his works were transformative fair uses of Cariou's photographs,
8120-494: The factors to be considered shall include: The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors. The four factors of analysis for fair use set forth above derive from the opinion of Joseph Story in Folsom v. Marsh , in which the defendant had copied 353 pages from the plaintiff's 12-volume biography of George Washington in order to produce
8236-404: The fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use
8352-803: The film in a history book on the subject in Time Inc v. Bernard Geis Associates . In the decisions of the Second Circuit in Salinger v. Random House and in New Era Publications Int'l v. Henry Holt & Co , the aspect of whether the copied work has been previously published was considered crucial, assuming the right of the original author to control the circumstances of the publication of his work or preference not to publish at all. However, Judge Pierre N. Leval views this importation of certain aspects of France's droit moral d'artiste ( moral rights of
8468-495: The film's use of their footage, specifically footage of the firefighters discussing the collapse of the World Trade Center . With the help of an intellectual property lawyer, the creators of Loose Change successfully argued that a majority of the footage used was for historical purposes and was significantly transformed in the context of the film. They agreed to remove a few shots that were used as B-roll and served no purpose to
8584-402: The first fair use factor. The Campbell case also addressed the subfactor mentioned in the quotation above, "whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes." In an earlier case, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. , the Supreme Court had stated that "every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively ... unfair." In Campbell ,
8700-419: The following: The NonCommercial license allows image creators to restrict selling and profiting from their works by other parties and thus maintaining free of charge access to images. The "non-commercial" option included in some Creative Commons licenses is controversial in definition, as it is sometimes unclear what can be considered a non-commercial setting, and application, since its restrictions differ from
8816-623: The founder of Creative Commons, has contributed to the site. Unsplash moved from using the CC0 license to a custom license in June 2017 and to an explicitly nonfree license in January 2018. In October 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation approved the Creative Commons CC0 as conformant with the Open Definition and recommend the license to dedicate content to the public domain. In July 2022 Fedora Linux disallowed software licensed under CC0 due to patent rights explicitly not being waived under
8932-458: The four statutory factors. The first factor is "the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes." To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new. In the 1841 copyright case Folsom v. Marsh , Justice Joseph Story wrote: "[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from
9048-419: The greater discussion. The case was settled and a potential multimillion-dollar lawsuit was avoided. This Film Is Not Yet Rated also relied on fair use to feature several clips from copyrighted Hollywood productions. The director had originally planned to license these clips from their studio owners but discovered that studio licensing agreements would have prohibited him from using this material to criticize
9164-524: The legal robustness of Creative Commons public licenses. In early 2006, podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos from Curry's Flickr page without Curry's permission. The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. While the verdict was in favor of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they did not repeat the offense. Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, main creator of
9280-422: The legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor test . The U.S. Supreme Court has traditionally characterized fair use as an affirmative defense , but in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. (2015) (the "dancing baby" case), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that fair use was not merely a defense to an infringement claim, but
9396-600: The license. Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses have since been retired, and are no longer recommended for new works. The retired licenses include all licenses lacking the Attribution element other than CC0, as well as the following four licenses: The latest version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses, released on November 25, 2013, are generic licenses that are applicable to most jurisdictions and do not usually require ports. No new ports have been implemented in version 4.0 of
9512-471: The license. Of this sum, €40 goes to the photographer, and the remainder is retained by VGSE. The Higher Regional Court of Cologne dismissed the claim in May 2019. Creative Commons maintains a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through
9628-542: The license. Version 4.0 discourages using ported versions and instead acts as a single global license. Since 2004, all current licenses other than the CC0 variant require attribution of the original author, as signified by the BY component (as in the preposition "by"). The attribution must be given to "the best of [one's] ability using the information available". Creative Commons suggests the mnemonic "TASL": title – author – source [web link] – [CC] licence . Generally this implies
9744-548: The license." In 2007, Virgin Mobile Australia launched an advertising campaign promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to Flickr using a Creative Commons-BY (Attribution) license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing
9860-474: The mobile market. However, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed this decision, deciding that Google's actions satisfy all four tests for fair use, and that granting Oracle exclusive rights to use Java APIs on mobile markets "would interfere with, not further, copyright's basic creativity objectives." In April 2006, the filmmakers of the Loose Change series were served with a lawsuit by Jules and Gédéon Naudet over
9976-455: The modern concepts of fair use and fair dealing . Fair use was a common-law (i.e. created by judges as a legal precedent ) doctrine in the U.S. until it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976 , 17 U.S.C. § 107 . The term "fair use" originated in the United States. Although related, the limitations and exceptions to copyright for teaching and library archiving in
10092-565: The music company had acted in bad faith by ordering removal of a video that represented fair use of the song. On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a copyright owner must affirmatively consider whether the complained of conduct constituted fair use before sending a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, rather than waiting for the alleged infringer to assert fair use. 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015). "Even if, as Universal urges, fair use
10208-438: The original artwork was. Second, the photographs had already been published, diminishing the significance of their nature as creative works. Third, although normally making a "full" replication of a copyrighted work may appear to violate copyright, here it was found to be reasonable and necessary in light of the intended use. Lastly, the court found that the market for the original photographs would not be substantially diminished by
10324-459: The original author, would be copyright infringement but not plagiarism. The U.S. Supreme Court described fair use as an affirmative defense in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. This means that in litigation on copyright infringement, the defendant bears the burden of raising and proving that the use was fair and not an infringement. Thus, fair use need not even be raised as a defense unless
10440-477: The original work) but not duplicates. A subset of public copyright licenses which aim for no restrictions at all like public domain ("full permissive"), are public domain-like licenses . The 2000 released WTFPL license is a short public domain like software license . The 2009 released CC0 was created as public domain license for all content with compatibility with also law domains (e.g. Civil law of continental Europe ) where dedicating into public domain
10556-422: The original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy ." A key consideration in later fair use cases
10672-403: The other hand, the social usefulness of freely available information can weigh against the appropriateness of copyright for certain fixations. The Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy , for example, was purchased and copyrighted by Time magazine. Yet its copyright was not upheld, in the name of the public interest, when Time tried to enjoin the reproduction of stills from
10788-455: The people featured in the articles. GateHouse sued That is Great News for copyright infringement and breach of contract. GateHouse claimed that TGN violated the non-commercial and no-derivative works restrictions on GateHouse Creative Commons licensed work when TGN published the material on its website. The case was settled on August 17, 2010, though the settlement was not made public. In 2007, photographer Art Drauglis uploaded several pictures to
10904-556: The photo-sharing website Flickr, giving them the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA). One photo, titled "Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD.", was downloaded by Kappa Map Group, a map-making company, and published in 2012 on the front cover of Montgomery Co. Maryland Street Atlas . The text "Photo: Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD Photographer: Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, Creative Commoms [ sic ], CC-BY-SA-2.0"
11020-482: The plaintiff first shows (or the defendant concedes) a prima facie case of copyright infringement. If the work was not copyrightable, the term had expired, or the defendant's work borrowed only a small amount , for instance, then the plaintiff cannot make out a prima facie case of infringement, and the defendant need not even raise the fair use defense. In addition, fair use is only one of many limitations, exceptions, and defenses to copyright infringement. Thus,
11136-495: The principles of open content promoted by other permissive licenses . In 2014 Wikimedia Deutschland published a guide to using Creative Commons licenses as wiki pages for translations and as PDF. Rights in an adaptation can be expressed by a CC license that is compatible with the status or licensing of the original work or works on which the adaptation is based. The legal implications of large numbers of works having Creative Commons licensing are difficult to predict, and there
11252-436: The public license. Upon activation of the license, the licensee must adhere to all conditions of the license, otherwise the license agreement is illegitimate, and the licensee would commit a copyright infringement. The author, or the licensor as a proxy, has the legal rights to act upon any copyright infringement. The licensee has a limited period to correct any non-compliance. The CC licenses all grant "baseline rights", such as
11368-442: The results weighed together, in light of the purposes of copyright" has helped modulate this emphasis in interpretation. In evaluating the fourth factor, courts often consider two kinds of harm to the potential market for the original work. Courts recognize that certain kinds of market harm do not negate fair use, such as when a parody or negative review impairs the market of the original work. Copyright considerations may not shield
11484-520: The right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide for non-commercial purposes and without modification. In addition, different versions of license prescribe different rights, as shown in this table: The last two clauses are not free content licenses, according to definitions such as DFSG or the Free Software Foundation 's standards, and cannot be used in contexts that require these freedoms, such as Misplaced Pages . For software , Creative Commons includes three free licenses created by other institutions:
11600-647: The rights to their innovations while also allowing for some external use of the invention. The CCL emerged as a reaction to the decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft , in which the United States Supreme Court ruled constitutional provisions of the Copyright Term Extension Act that extended the copyright term of works to be the last living author's lifespan plus an additional 70 years. The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with
11716-469: The sharing and remixing (creating derivative works ), including for commercial use, so long as attribution is given. Besides copyright licenses, Creative Commons also offers CC0 , a tool for relinquishing copyright and releasing material into the public domain . CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible. Or, when not legally possible, CC0 acts as fallback as public domain equivalent license . Development of CC0 began in 2007 and it
11832-466: The use of Betamax had either reduced their viewership or negatively impacted their business. In Harper & Row, the case regarding President Ford's memoirs, the Supreme Court labeled the fourth factor "the single most important element of fair use" and it has enjoyed some level of primacy in fair use analyses ever since. Yet the Supreme Court's more recent announcement in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc that "all [four factors] are to be explored, and
11948-584: The use of application programming interfaces (APIs) used to define functionality of the Java programming language, created by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle Corporation. Google used the APIs' definition and their structure, sequence and organization (SSO) in creating the Android operating system to support the mobile device market. Oracle had sued Google in 2010 over both patent and copyright violations, but after two cycles,
12064-425: The use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy ... In short, we must often ... look to the nature and objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used, and the degree in which the use may prejudice the sale, or diminish the profits, or supersede the objects, of the original work. The statutory fair use factors quoted above come from
12180-452: The very creativity which [copyright] law is designed to foster." Though originally a common law doctrine, it was enshrined in statutory law when the U.S. Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1976 . The U.S. Supreme Court has issued several major decisions clarifying and reaffirming the fair use doctrine since the 1980s, the most recent being in the 2021 decision Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. The 1710 Statute of Anne, an act of
12296-616: The video on YouTube . Four months later, Universal Music , the owner of the copyright to the song, ordered YouTube to remove the video under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act . Lenz notified YouTube immediately that her video was within the scope of fair use, and she demanded that it be restored. YouTube complied after six weeks, rather than the two weeks required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lenz then sued Universal Music in California for her legal costs, claiming
12412-474: The work obtained under a Creative Commons license may continue to be used under that license. When works are protected by more than one Creative Commons license, the user may choose any of them. The author, or the licensor in case the author did a contractual transfer of rights, needs to have the exclusive rights on the work. If the work has already been published under a public license, it can be uploaded by any third party, once more on another platform, by using
12528-460: Was added for scientific data rather than software, but some members of the OSI believed it could weaken users' defenses against software patents . As a result, Creative Commons withdrew their submission, and the license is not currently approved by the OSI. From 2013 to 2017, the stock photography website Unsplash used the CC0 license, distributing several million free photos a month. Lawrence Lessig ,
12644-453: Was amended in response to these concerns by adding a final sentence: "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors." The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair. Using most or all of
12760-429: Was an expressly authorized right, and an exception to the exclusive rights granted to the author of a creative work by copyright law: "Fair use is therefore distinct from affirmative defenses where a use infringes a copyright, but there is no liability due to a valid excuse, e.g., misuse of a copyright." Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A ,
12876-591: Was found not to be fair use. That decision was appealed and contested by Internet rights activists such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation , who argued that it was fair use. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of the defendant, Arriba Soft. In reaching its decision, the court utilized the statutory four-factor analysis. First, it found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative, noting that they were not meant to be viewed at high resolution as
12992-413: Was not a public copyright license, because it limited licensees to those in developing nations . Current Creative Commons licenses are explicitly identified as public licenses. Any person can apply a CC license to their work, and any person can take advantage of the license to use the licensed work according to the terms and conditions of the relevant license. According to the Open Knowledge Foundation ,
13108-423: Was placed on the back cover, but nothing on the front indicated authorship. The validity of the CC BY-SA 2.0 as a license was not in dispute. The CC BY-SA 2.0 requires that the licensee to use nothing less restrictive than the CC BY-SA 2.0 terms. The atlas was sold commercially and not for free reuse by others. The dispute was whether Drauglis' license terms that would apply to "derivative works" applied to
13224-643: Was released in 2009. A major target of the license was the scientific data community. In 2010, Creative Commons announced its Public Domain Mark , a tool for labeling works already in the public domain. Together, CC0 and the Public Domain Mark replace the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, which took a U.S.-centric approach and co-mingled distinct operations. In 2011, the Free Software Foundation added CC0 to its free software licenses . However,
13340-557: Was sufficient to credit the author of the photo as prominently as authors of similar authorship (such as the authors of individual maps contained in the book) and that the name "CC-BY-SA-2.0" is sufficiently precise to locate the correct license on the internet and can be considered a valid identifier for the license. In July 2016, German computer magazine LinuxUser reported that a German blogger Christoph Langner used two CC BY -licensed photographs from Berlin photographer Dennis Skley on his private blog Linuxundich. Langner duly mentioned
13456-520: Was thrown out of a Texas court for lack of jurisdiction. In the fall of 2006, the collecting society Sociedad General de Autores y Editores ( SGAE ) in Spain sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, owner of a disco bar located in Badajoz who played CC-licensed music. SGAE argued that Fernández should pay royalties for public performance of the music between November 2002 and August 2005. The Lower Court rejected
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