Slightly off topic for this blog but I just wanted to mention the U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index.
"This Fair Use Index is a
project undertaken by the Office of the Register in support of the 2013 Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement of the Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC).
"Fair
use is a longstanding and vital aspect of American copyright law. The
goal of the Index is to make the principles and application of fair use
more accessible and understandable to the public by presenting a
searchable database of court opinions, including by category and type of
use (e.g., music, internet/digitization, parody).
"The Fair Use Index tracks a variety of judicial decisions to
help both lawyers and non-lawyers better understand the types of uses
courts have previously determined to be fair—or not fair. The decisions
span multiple federal jurisdictions, including the U.S. Supreme Court,
circuit courts of appeal, and district courts. Please note that while
the Index incorporates a broad selection of cases, it does not include
all judicial opinions on fair use. The Copyright Office will update and
expand the Index periodically."
I found a pointer to this on Wondermark comic site. They note:
"The Index itself is a series of summaries of key legal decisions regarding copyright and fair use, largely from the last sixty years.
"The Fair Use Index includes some watershed copyright cases, such as 1978′s Walt Disney Productions v. Air Pirates, the precedent that defines the infringement threshold for copying copyrighted characters for “parody” purposes.
It might be said that under the Air Pirates test, the entire product line of the t-shirt website TeeFury is illegal, and I notice that very conveniently, most of their designs are only available in strictly limited, before-they-can-send-us-a-cease-and-desist editions."
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