Practical Effect of Fair Use Defense
The practical effect of this law and the court decisions following it is that it is usually possible to quote from a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment upon it, teach students about it, and possibly for other uses. Certain well-established uses cause few problems. A teacher who prints a few copies of a poem to illustrate a technique will have no problem on all four of the above factors (except possibly on amount and substantiality), but some cases are not so clear. All the factors are considered and balanced in each case: a book reviewer who quotes a paragraph as an example of the author's style will probably fall under fair use even though he may sell his review commercially; but a non-profit educational website that reproduces whole articles from technical magazines will probably be found to infringe if the publisher can demonstrate that the website affects the market for the magazine, even though the website itself is non-commercial.
Free Republic, LLC, owner of the political website freerepublic.com, was found liable for copyright infringement in L.A. Times v. Free Republic for reproducing and archiving full-text versions of plaintiffs' news articles even though the judge found the website minimally commercial. She held that "while defendants' do not necessarily 'exploit' the articles for commercial gain, their posting to the Free Republic site allows defendants and other visitors to avoid paying the 'customary price' charged for the works."
The April 2000 opinion ruled concerning the four factors of fair use that 1) defendants' use of plaintiffs' articles is minimally, if at all, transformative, 2) the factual content of the articles copied "weighs in favour of finding of fair use of the news articles by defendants in this case", though it didn't "provide strong support" 3) concerning the amount and substantiality prong, "the wholesale copying of plaintiffs' articles weighs against the finding of fair use", and 4) the plaintiffs showed that they were trying to exploit the market for viewing their articles online and defendants did not rebut their showing by proving an absence of usurpation harm to plaintiffs. Ultimately the court found "that the defendants may not assert a fair use defense to plaintiffs' copyright infringement claim".
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