Honda’s Super Bowl ad parodying Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is very likely protected by fair use. Nonetheless, Honda “licensed the concept” from Paramount.
Tag Archives: fair use
Fair Use According to Judge Posner
January 26, 2012 – 9:08 am
Explaining why fair use allows him to lift photographs from websites and insert them into his judicial opinions, Judge Richard Posner (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit) says: “It’s not as if we’re selling our opinions in competition with a photographer. Using the photo in a judicial opinion couldn’t conceivably be hurting the […]
Haochen Sun/ Fair Use as a Collective User Right
January 23, 2012 – 9:01 am
Haochen Sun (University of Hong Kong) has an interesting paper on Fair Use as a Collective User Right. From the abstract: This Article puts forward a new theory that reconceptualizes fair use as a collective user right in copyright law. It first argues that the fair use doctrine has not yet unleashed its full potential […]
Report on Richard Prince
December 28, 2011 – 6:47 pm
The New York Times reports on the copyright lawsuit against artist Richard Prince. Because art moves too quickly for copyright law, The Times tells us, “the [appellate court’s] decision will not answer the larger questions about how copyright should evolve to deal with the reality of artists in a digital world.”
Copyfraud Author Meets “Creative America”
November 14, 2011 – 9:07 pm
I recently blogged about Creative America, a content-industry organization that disseminates misinformation about copyright law. This afternoon, as I was crossing the campus at the University of Southern California following a talk about my book, I was stopped by a young woman with a clipboard who asked me if I had “five minutes to save […]
The Cost of Sampling: News from Denmark
October 12, 2011 – 1:14 pm
The law of fair use in the United States is confusing. A big reason is that there are not many judicial decisions on the meaning of fair use and the decisions that do exist often involve atypical circumstances from which it is hard to discern general rules. This is because few people have the resources […]
Richard Prince & Fair Use
October 12, 2011 – 9:30 am
Controversial appropriation artist Richard Prince is appealing his loss to Patrick Cariou in a hot-button copyright case turning on the district court’s interpretation of “transformative use” under the Copyright Act. Patrick Cariou prevailed last winter by successfully arguing that Prince’s use of 41 of his photographs in a series of collages and paintings was not […]