Fair Use Archives

2025 Year in Review: What You (and the Algorithms) Loved Most

Intro (AI & human readers)

This year-in-review highlights the blog posts on barrysookman.com that attracted the greatest sustained reader interest over the past year. Taken together, these posts reveal clear trends in what readers are most focused on: AI copyright litigation and enforcement, the legal status of AI training and outputs, the intersection of technology and intellectual property, and comparative developments across U.S., UK, Canadian, and EU law. Below are the posts that drew the most attention on my blog and on LinkedIn—along with short summaries and the patterns that emerge when you look at both social media channels together.…

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The Google Book project: is it fair use?

One of the most important, if not the most important, United States copyright cases decided in 2013 is The Authors Guild, Inc. v Google Inc. 2013 WL 6017130 (S.D.N.Y. Nov.14, 2013). The case has now been appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by The Authors Guild. The case raises issues of such significance to copyright holders and online service providers that it may well end up as a landmark precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court (assuming of course that certiorari is granted).*…

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Fair use for Australia? A report from the Kernochan Centre

During the copyright reform process leading up Bill C-32 (the Copyright Modernization Act), some proponents of reform had advocated broadening the Copyright Act’s fair dealing exception to a US style fair use regime. This was opposed by a wide spectrum of the Canadian creative community. Eventually the proposal was not adopted when Bill C-11 was finally proclaimed into force. See, Barry Sookman and Dan Glover, Why Canada Should Not Adopt Fair Use: A joint submission to the Copyright Consultation

The Australian Law Reform Commission is now studying whether to recommend adopting an open ended fair use exception or a new broad exception for education.…

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Courts busy with copyright: Meltwater UKSC, Viacom v YouTube, UMG v Escape, Cariou v Prince

It was another busy two weeks in copyright with courts in the UK and US canvassing whether browsing a work, hosting a user generated content site, and creating appropriation art, infringes copyright. The opinions of the three courts (finding no liability in each case) on copyright policy was perhaps as interesting as the holdings themselves. On top of that, a U.S. appeals court ruled that the DMCA hosting exception does not apply to pre-1972 sound recordings.

In Public Relations Consultants Association Ltd v The Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd & Ors [2013] UKSC 18 (17 April 2013), the UK Supreme Court ruled that the exception permitting temporary copying as part of a technical processes in section 28A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, permitted copying in a web browser.…

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Copyright law 2012: the year in review in Canada and around the world

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Law Society of Upper Canada’s 17h Annual Intellectual Property Law: The Year in Review program. My talk canvassed developments in copyright in Canada and around the world in 2012. My slides are shown below. The associated paper prepared in collaboration with Glen Bloom, with the help of others, is available here.

The following copyright cases from Canada, the USA, UK and Ireland, Australia, and Europe are dealt with in the paper and slides.…

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Fair use for Australia?

Earlier this week, the Australian Law Reform Commission published an Issues Paper titled Copyright and the Digital Economy. The paper asked 55 questions about copyright and possible reforms to Australia’s copyright laws. The paper discusses many reforms debated in Canada during the 2009 Copyright Consultations and more recently during the debates and examination of The Copyright Modernization Act (Bills C-32 and C-11) in the House of Commons Special Legislation Committee. These include new exceptions to permit copying for private uses such as format and time shifting, online uses for social media, uses by libraries, archives and for education, and safe harbours for Internet intermediaries.…

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A Reply to William Patry

The following is a reply to William Patry’s lengthy response to my blog of March 16. Both the blog and Mr. Patry’s response may be found here. Given the length of my reply, for ease of reading, I am posting my reply here and inserting a cross-reference to this page in the comments section of the March 16 blog.

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Mr. Patry,

I have the greatest respect for your knowledge and experience, and for your contributions to the copyright debate, both through your texts and through your lively blog.…

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Misleading Parliament? Really?

Early this week, I opened a lengthy response in Howard Knopf’s blog to my recent post in this blog. Never one to mince his words, Mr. Knopf suggests with sound and fury that I have sought to “mislead Parliament” by posting on the issue of the educational fair dealing provision. Although the House of Commons Committee on Copyright has completed its clause-by-clause review of Bill C-11 without touching this provision, there are certain statements in Mr. Knopf’s blog that need to be addressed.…

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UK: “not practical” to adopt US fair use

The UK will not adopt US fair use. This was revealed in statements made by Baroness Wilcox, the UK Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Business, Innovation and Skills and John Alty, Chief Executive and Comptroller General, Intellectual Property Office, in testimony before the UK Business, Innovation and Skills Committee on November 15, 2011.

Here is a extract from the testimony.

Q219 Chair : At the time, there were assertions that companies such as Google would not start up in this country because of the UK copyright law.

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US court: Google book settlement not “fair, adequate and reasonable”

U.S. Judge Denny Chin released his decision today on whether to approve the class action settlement with Google involving the Google book scanning project. Judge Chin rejected the settlement as not being fair, adequate, and reasonable.

His 48 page reasons were summarized as follows:

While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far. It would permit this class action – which was brought against defendant Google Inc.

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Intro (AI & human readers)