Questions tagged [fair-use]
An exception to the limitations that can be imposed by a copyright owner. A similar concept in the U.K. and other commonwealth jurisdictions is called "fair dealing."
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Is a private individual shopping for personal goods from companies "non-commercial"?
Suppose Alice is interested in buying something for their personal use, completely unrelated to their work or making money. She investigates the products produced by Bob Inc. and Charlie Corp., both ...
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Copyright risks for code contributed by generative AI
Suppose a company is developing software, and an engineer/coder uses some code generated by Code LLaMA or some similar generative AI.
Microsoft has brought out copilot, which does a similar thing and ...
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Copyright and Fair use: Logos
Some companies have written articles about my website. Many of the articles were also interviews.
My question is - can I use the Logos of the companies on my website under the "fair use" ...
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Is it fair use of copyright to create and distribute a simulation model from a copyrighted schematic?
Let's say if company A developed an electronic product.
A published the product's datasheet on its website free to the public, copyright of the datasheet is owned by A. One part of the datasheet is ...
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Is it fair use to include unpurchased media in a website that is still under development?
When a new website is being built for a client, it often begins as a "development" site that uses one or more methods to make sure that it is not accessible by normal and customary means. ...
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What countries don't have fair use in copyright law?
I know that Japan is one of these countries without fair use, are there any others?
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Why are authors suing Meta and OpenAI instead of Shawn Presser for copyright infringement?
Various authors are suing OpenAI and Meta for alleged copyright infringement in using the authors' works to train the companies' large language models (LLMs).
My understanding is that OpenAI has ...
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Does the UK text and data mining exception to copyright allow non-commercial projects free use of anything on the internet to train their models?
On the UK government page on Exceptions to copyright the text and data mining exception is described as:
Text and data mining is the use of automated analytical techniques to analyse text and data ...
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Does the UK time-shifting exception to copyright allow viewing beyond the end of a subscription period?
On the UK government page on Exceptions to copyright the time-shifting exception is described as:
A recording of a broadcast can be made in domestic premises for private and domestic use to enable it ...
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Fair use vs Photo of Convicted Criminal
Imagine writing an article about a convicted criminal, only to discover that there are no photos of the individual that are in the public domain. You find a couple photos in magazines, but your ...
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Can I make an intermediate copy of an entire work for the purpose of enabling me to criticize it?
A recent question asked about the practice of transcribing music for hire.
Say I would like to publish a critical analysis of a song. In the process of preparing this analysis I need to actually ...
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Are fan games legal?
"Fan games" are video games made by fans using a popular intellectual property, without license. Are they protected by "fair use" or are the IP holders just allowing it?
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Fair use question relating to copyright law [duplicate]
Good day. I currently work in the publishing field, but have a unique inquiry regarding fair use related to copyright law; I am interested in launching an executive summary service to assist busy ...
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Is using a copyrighted image/video in a school assignment considered "fair use"? [duplicate]
In the majority of classes I've taken in middle/highschool, when making a slideshow, poster, or some other kind of visual presentation, teachers often remind students that they should not be using ...
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If I am sure that I have an argument for fair use, can I use shadowed silhouettes of copyright or trademark characters on the cover of my book? [closed]
I have a very specific idea for a book cover that involves using shadow silhouettes of copyrighted/trademarked characters. It is a non-fiction book about character arcs. The title and cover of the ...
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Would using individual sentences from news articles for a language learning app be considered fair use?
Suppose a commercial language learning app displays a single sentence at a time to a user, with the purpose of reviewing the sentence to learn new words.
In order to get examples of natural sentences ...
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Hackintosh vs. fair use
Note: Cross-posted from SE SuperUser to get thoughts from legal experts here.
Follow up question to Revisit the Hackintosh policy.
Use case:
I create a userscript (in a [licenced] Windows or a Linux)...
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Legality of using book covers from Google Books API on a website
Under US copyright law, is it legal to download images of book covers from the Google Books API and display them on my website? The purpose pertains to obtaining product images for an online store ...
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Can a song be used in a presentation for work?
Does it fall under that Fair Use Act of 1976 to include a song as the intro to a presentation for work if the presentation is being given for educational/teaching purposes?
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Is it illegal for a firm to train an AI model on a CC BY-SA 4.0 corpus and make a commercial use of it without distributing the model under CC BY-SA?
https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388551/178179 mentions that SE will force some firms to pay to be allowed to train an AI model on the SE data dump (CC BY-SA licensed) and make a commercial use of it ...
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For a work to be considered "transformative" under fair use, does the "new expression, meaning or message" have to be about the original work?
One of the four factors used to determine whether use of copyrighted material is considered fair use is "the purpose and character of the use." The essence of this factor seems to be "...
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Can I use text or ideas from Youtube Comments in a book or online work?
I recently ran into an interesting back and forth between quite a few people in youtube comments, and it was the topic I'm interested in writing about: whether it would be a book or just post it ...
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What legal questions must be answered to determine the international copyright status of generated art?
Below is my best understanding of how art is generated by machine learning. I understand that the copyright ownership of the final product and any infringement in the process is currently an open ...
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Can I use footage from House.gov in a (mostly) free web application?
Right now, I am working on an information service website relating to political offices in the U.S.
This is something I'm working on in my own time, not for a company. But, I would like to potentially ...
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Why does Japanese entertainment make such backhanded references to brands (e.g. WcDonalds instead of McDonalds)?
There's tons of examples. To name a few:
MgRonald's and Sentucky Fried Chicken (instead of McDonald's and KFC) in Hataraku Maou-sama
Attack Family (instead of Smash Brothers) in Jaku Kyara Tomozaki-...
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Can a researcher use YouTube videos to train a ML model?
Manually migrating this from here because the answers were unsatisfactory: https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/26079/is-it-legal-to-scrape-youtube-videos-for-training-data
Can a machine ...
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Selling Reading Guides For Novels
Can I create and sell reading guides for novels on teacher resource sites such as Teacher Pay Teacher without getting into copyright issues. I would, of course credit, the author for all of the book ...
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Does fair use allow use of let's play videos without permission in the USA?
Let's say a vlogger is talking about video games they don't currently play. They need some sort of video to show while they are talking and so many will fall back to let's plays for videos. A let's ...
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Take part of a song slow it down a bit and put it on a loop
Lets say someone hypothetically took the beginning part of a song and slowed it down a bit and put it on a loop for 3 min..
In this scenario the original song was copyrighted.
Would this be copyright ...
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Why is a cover song not fair use? (But parody songs are?)
Considering fair use law, parody, transformative works: Weird Al always asks for permission for his parodies but many law professionals have stated he would not have to.
Considering all this, why does ...
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Is Apple violating any specific rights of mine by preventing me from taking a fair use screenshot?
Apple's Safari web browser prevents you from taking a screenshot of DRM (Digital Rights Management) content, such as Netflix movies, by blacking out that part of screen (when taking screenshot) which ...
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Uploading YouTube video about doing problem set from a college textbook/ other reference book [duplicate]
I am confused with the definition of fair use or educational use. I wonder whether publishing videos publicly on Youtube (or a similar website) about how to solve the problem in a textbook will ...
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Are random generators that use the names of fictional characters not infringing?
For example, if I create a random generator that uses the names of the characters from a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) video game plus a random string attached after the character name, and ...
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Is it legal for someone to publish a conversation from the Youtube comments section? What if they were one of the commenters?
If there was a situation where a journalist wanted to publish a back and forth conversation between two commenters that occurred in the Youtube comments section of a video by quoting the entire ...
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How should I go about talking to an Intellectual Property / Copyright expert about an ecommerce product I want to sell?
I am developing a plan to offer a selection of products of similar design in a new online shop.
These designs incorporate the Intellectual Property of others (large corporations) but in a way which I ...
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Can a wiki for a video game be created without authorization from the game creator?
Consider someone wants to create a wiki (user-editable community site) for Heroes of the Storm. The creator of a wiki site is not necessarily the author of any substantive content on the site, but ...
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Rules behind using news logos on websites
I see many people on LinkedIn using the logo of news sites they were featured on or had a PR piece republished on. What are the US laws around the use of such logos?
What happens if someone falsely ...
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how to fair use another company's logo in personal blogs for review or tutorial purpose?
Here is my initial question about adding creator information on some "artwork" that also contains other companies' logos.
How to properly add creator information when the art work is done ...
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Can I share a copy of Adobe Standalone Flash Player?
As you all know by now, Flash is dead. However, people still want to play flash games. People used to be able to download the standalone adobe flash player to keep playing games flash games, but ...
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How to properly add creator information when the art work is done with other companies' logo?
For a straightforward example, I would like to add a watermark on all the pictures hosted on my website, but at the same time, some images have other companies' logos and other text.
Sure I don't own ...
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Can I make animated summaries of shows/movies?
I was wondering if I could make animated short videos (like a minute long). I was planning to make short animations doing a very basic version of the stories, they would include all of my own sounds ...
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Determining Fair Use of Images in an Online Encyclopedia
Background
Fair use hinges on four factors, which are then weighed by judges:
Purpose and Character of the Use
Nature of the Copyrighted Work
Amount of Copyrighted Work Used
Effect of the Use on ...
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Transcription law
(I'd be interested in UK, US, or any internet/international biased opinions here; as well as anything I could further ready up on!)
Let's assume a physical Text exists.
Is it legal for person A to ...
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Frequency lists derived from copyrighted works
If someone were to publish word frequency lists derived from copyrighted films or books on their website would this constitute fair use, or be a breach of copyright?
The word frequency lists would ...
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Use of NFL footage or links to YouTube for Educational Life Coaching
Suppose that a certified life coach wants to use football principals of quarterbacking to help individuals have a visual of what it means to quarterback your life.
Would showing live or YouTube ...
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Can I use Google Cloud text-to-speech to create and monetize an audiobook from a public domain book?
I have text for a book in the public domain. I use Google Cloud speech-to-text to convert the book into an audio format. Can I distribute/monetize the resulting audiobook as I wish?
Previous question ...
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Must a work be "essential" for fair use to apply?
In comments on this answer (now moved to chat) user supercat wrote:
While there seems to be a belief that use of short clips is automatically fair use, a key requirement of fair use is that the ...
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Does Google have a right to block our app for trademark use?
In a recent app store update, we've included in our description the names of several brands that we support through functionality in our app. Some if not all of these names are trademarked in the ...
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Is it legal to download and run pirated abandonware because I'm curious about the software?
Is downloading Windows 95 and running it just because I'm curious about it legal?
Purpose and character of the use: it's noncommercial, and I am doing it to learn about the software, but I'm not sure ...
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Can I use an image of SpongeBob in the thumbnail of my video about the cartoon?
Suppose I made a commentary video about SpongeBob. Would using an image of SpongeBob in the thumbnail be considered fair use in this case?
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