Getting to Best Practices - A Personal Voyage around Fair Use

Authors

Peter Jaszi, American University Washington College of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2010

Journal

Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A.

Volume

57

Issue

3

First Page

315

Last Page

329

Abstract

These days, I view fair use as a central feature of the law around our information ecology - its presence reminding us, from day to day, that there is more to copyright than maximization, and that innovation happens when the doctrinal settings are loose enough to permit a good deal of "play" (literally and figuratively) in the system. But before the mid-1990s I thought little about the fair use doctrine and did less. As I suspect may be true of other copyright lawyers of my generation (and the ones preceding it, I spent most of my professional career taking fair use for granted. I tended to view it as a minor application "running in the background" - occasionally useful, but hardly central to the copyright enterprise.' As a result, I gave it little sustained attention, either as a matter of theory or as one of practice, in my first decades as a practitioner and a teacher.

Recommended Citation

Peter Jaszi, Getting to Best Practices - A Personal Voyage around Fair Use, 57 Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 315 (2010).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2112