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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."

The U.S. law that provides for fair use is 17 USC § 107.

The UK has fair dealing instead of fair use. (UK gov. description). It is also an affirmative defence. It is less permissive than the fair use standard in the US, requiring that the re-use be from one of four categories of use, and then that that use also be fair (this second step roughly follows the US test).

Canonical answers here:

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Can "Dumb Starbucks" be legally considered Fair Use as satire or parody?

About a year ago, a new, familiar-looking coffee shop opened in LA. Their reasoning for this was, basically, that it's making fun of the popular coffeehouse chain and is thus fair use: Naturally, it attracted a lot of attention and was later…
fstanis
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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 without distributing the model under CC…
Franck Dernoncourt
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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 it's really "educational" because there is…
Someone
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Is there any legal justification for content on the web without an explicit licence being freeware?

Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI has expressed an opinion that creative works published openly on the web without an explicit licence are freeware and the restrictions of copyright do not apply. Is there anything at all that could support…
User65535
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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 might choose the logos, styles, initial…
user47165
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Is WINE illegal?

Is WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator) illegal? Given that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held in Oracle v. Google that APIs are copyrightable, is WINE (which reproduces the Windows API) a copyright infringement? Can reproduction…
JoshJordan
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In the US, when is fair use a defense to copyright infringement?

What is fair use in the US? When would it be a successful defense to copyright infringement?
user3851
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What is the legality of using copyrighted DnD monsters in personal writing?

So, I'm an artist and a writer. I also happen to be very into Dungeons & Dragons. I have made dozens of story ideas in my head, but still have yet to fully write any out. However, there is one story idea I've gotten recently that I'm particularly…
A_Fluffy_Mugcake
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Fair Use and DMCA

My project (EditVideoBot) is an automated 'Twitter bot' program that allows users to edit videos within Twitter (they can add music to the video, or their own text, etc). My first account I ran this project on was suspended at 31,000 followers after…
pigeonburger
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D&D Monsters and Copyright

We are making a college board game, and would like to know if we can use a few monsters from dnd to make our game. We don't use the same name as you do, just the images from online and the books.
Louis Lunn
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Fair Use of Photos as a Derivative Work

This question comes specifically from a particular example. Within Ethics for the Information Age (Quinn), 5th Edition, there is a chapter on Intellectual Property, and while most of it is well-explained, this section on fair use confuses me: Fair…
Seymour Guado
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Fair use of text snippets in a dictionary

If a dictionary (about the use of scientific terminology) includes snippets from several sources, would an authorization be needed from each copyright holder? Each entry in the dictionary would include several quotes. And multiple quotes would come…
Jason Waismann
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Copyright Fair Use: Is using the phrase "Courtesy of" legally acceptable when no permission has been given?

When quoting content under copyright fair use, is it legally acceptable (in English) to use the words "Courtesy of ACME Inc.", even if no permission has been granted? To me, the words "courtesy of" imply that permission has been granted. But I'm…
Amazon Dies In Darkness
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Is there a fair use exception for trademarks?

The copyright law has the famous fair-use exception, where you can legally use some parts of copyrighted works without having to pay any royalties to, or ask any permission from, the copyright holder. What about trademarks? For example, Oracle owns…
cnst
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Do search engines need permission to start searching?

I was talking to my friends a few days ago about search engines and we started discussing whether or not they need permission from websites to crawl them. I looked this one up and it said on Quora that you don't really need permission to crawl them…
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