136-722: The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or GFDL ) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project . It is similar to the GNU General Public License , giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify (except for "invariant sections") a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities (greater than 100),
272-697: A prima facie case can be defeated without relying on fair use. For instance, the Audio Home Recording Act establishes that it is legal, using certain technologies, to make copies of audio recordings for non-commercial personal use. Some copyright owners claim infringement even in circumstances where the fair use defense would likely succeed, in hopes that the user will refrain from the use rather than spending resources in their defense. Strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) cases that allege copyright infringement, patent infringement, defamation, or libel may come into conflict with
408-553: A common law doctrine, it was enshrined in statutory law when the U.S. Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1976 . The U.S. Supreme Court has issued several major decisions clarifying and reaffirming the fair use doctrine since the 1980s, the most recent being in the 2021 decision Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. The 1710 Statute of Anne, an act of the Parliament of Great Britain, created copyright law to replace
544-483: A thumbnail in online search results did not even weigh against fair use, "if the secondary user only copies as much as is necessary for his or her intended use". However, even the use of a small percentage of a work can make the third factor unfavorable to the defendant, because the "substantiality" of the portion used is considered in addition to the amount used. For instance, in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises ,
680-408: A Fair Use Standard . Blanch v. Koons is another example of a fair use case that focused on transformativeness. In 2006, Jeff Koons used a photograph taken by commercial photographer Andrea Blanch in a collage painting. Koons appropriated a central portion of an advertisement she had been commissioned to shoot for a magazine. Koons prevailed in part because his use was found transformative under
816-453: A copyleft-licensed work are expected to reciprocate the author's action of copyleft-licensing the software by also copyleft-licensing any derivatives they might have made. Because of this requirement, copyleft licenses have also been described as "viral" due to their self-perpetuating terms. In addition to restrictions on copying, copyleft licenses address other possible impediments. They ensure that rights cannot be later revoked , and require
952-527: A divisive issue in the ideological strife between the Open Source Initiative and the free software movement . However, there is evidence that copyleft is both accepted and proposed by both parties: " Viral license " is a pejorative name for copyleft licenses. It originates from the terms 'General Public Virus' or 'GNU Public Virus' (GPV), which dates back to 1990, a year after the GPLv1
1088-423: A fair use defense would likely succeed. The simple reason is that the license terms negotiated with the copyright owner may be much less expensive than defending against a copyright suit, or having the mere possibility of a lawsuit threaten the publication of a work in which a publisher has invested significant resources. Fair use rights take precedence over the author's interest. Thus the copyright holder cannot use
1224-419: A fee. Unlike similar permissive licenses that also grant these freedoms, copyleft licenses also ensure that any modified versions of a work covered by a copyleft license must also grant these freedoms. Thus, copyleft licenses have conditions: that modifications of any work licensed under a copyleft license must be distributed under a compatible copyleft scheme and that the distributed modified work must include
1360-446: A force, right? We just unified electro-weak, ok? The grand unified field theory still escapes us until the document licences too are just additional permissions on top of GPL. I don't know how we'll ever get there, that's gravity, it's really hard. The GNU FDL requires that licensees, when printing a document covered by the license, must also include "this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to
1496-589: A letter in 1984 or 1985, on which was written: "Copyleft – all rights reversed ", which is a pun on the common copyright disclaimer " all rights reserved ". In France , a series of meetings taking place in 2000 under the title "Copyleft Attitude" gave birth to the Free Art License (FAL), theoretically valid in any jurisdiction bound by the Berne Convention and recommended by Stallman's own Free Software Foundation . Shortly thereafter,
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#17327836629301632-593: A license that allows one to use GNU GPL in combination with a limited warranty. For projects which will be run over a network, a variation of the GNU GPL, called the Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL), ensures that the source code is available to users of software over a network. Copyleft is a distinguishing feature of some free software licenses, while other free-software licenses are not copyleft licenses because they do not require
1768-517: A licensee is not allowed to save document copies "made" in a proprietary file format or using encryption. In 2003, Richard Stallman said about the above sentence on the debian-legal mailing list: This means that you cannot publish them under DRM systems to restrict the possessors of the copies. It isn't supposed to refer to use of encryption or file access control on your own copy. I will talk with our lawyer and see if that sentence needs to be clarified. A GNU FDL work can quickly be encumbered because
1904-836: A long period of discussion and negotiation between and amongst the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation and others had produced a proposal supported by both the FSF and Creative Commons to modify the Free Documentation License in such a fashion as to allow the possibility for the Wikimedia Foundation to migrate the projects to the similar Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) license. These changes were implemented on version 1.3 of
2040-486: A means of modifying the work. Under fair use , however, copyleft licenses may be superseded, just like regular copyrights. Therefore, any person utilizing a source licensed under a copyleft license for works they invent is free to choose any other license (or none at all) provided they meet the fair use standard. Copyleft licenses necessarily make creative use of relevant rules and laws to enforce their provisions. For example, when using copyright law, those who contribute to
2176-491: A message," and that he was not "trying to create anything with a new meaning or a new message." However, the artist's intended message "is not dispositive." Instead, the focus of the transformative use inquiry is how the artworks will "reasonably be perceived". The transformativeness inquiry is a deceptively simple test to determine whether a new work has a different purpose and character from an original work. However, courts have not been consistent in deciding whether something
2312-612: A negotiated settlement. In August 2008, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the Northern District of California ruled in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. that copyright holders cannot order a deletion of an online file without determining whether that posting reflected "fair use" of the copyrighted material. The case involved Stephanie Lenz, a writer and editor from Gallitzin, Pennsylvania , who made a home video of her thirteen-month-old son dancing to Prince's song " Let's Go Crazy " and posted
2448-469: A new, different title must be given and a list of previous titles must be kept. This could lead to the situation where there are a whole series of title pages, and dedications, in each and every copy of the book if it has a long lineage. These pages cannot be removed until the work enters the public domain after copyright expires. Richard Stallman said about invariant sections on the debian-legal mailing list: The goal of invariant sections, ever since
2584-448: A non-binding disclaimer, or notification, to revoke the right of fair use on works. However, binding agreements such as contracts or licence agreements may take precedence over fair use rights. The practical effect of the fair use doctrine is that a number of conventional uses of copyrighted works are not considered infringing. For instance, quoting from a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment upon it or teach students about it,
2720-506: 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. Fair use is decided on a case-by-case basis, on the entirety of circumstances. The same act done by different means or for a different purpose can gain or lose fair use status. The Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc. case revolves around
2856-420: A program's users, no matter what subsequent revisions anyone made to the original program. This original GPL did not grant rights to the public at large, only those who had already received the program; but it was the best that could be done under existing law. The new license was not at this time given the copyleft label. Richard Stallman stated that the use of "Copyleft" comes from Don Hopkins , who mailed him
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#17327836629302992-434: A separate two-volume work of his own. The court rejected the defendant's fair use defense with the following explanation: [A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede
3128-527: A separate, unrelated initiative in the United States yielded the Creative Commons license , available since 2001 in several different versions (only some of which can be described as copyleft) and more specifically tailored to U.S. law. While copyright law gives software authors control over copying, distribution and modification of their works, the goal of copyleft is to give all users of
3264-562: A similar defense. However, the Court in the case at bar rejected the idea that file-sharing is fair use. A U.S. court case from 2003, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. , provides and develops the relationship between thumbnails , inline linking , and fair use. In the lower District Court case on a motion for summary judgment , Arriba Soft's use of thumbnail pictures and inline linking from Kelly's website in Arriba Soft's image search engine
3400-561: A system of private ordering enforced by the Stationers' Company . The Statute of Anne did not provide for legal unauthorized use of material protected by copyright. In Gyles v Wilcox , the Court of Chancery established the doctrine of "fair abridgement", which permitted unauthorized abridgement of copyrighted works under certain circumstances. Over time, this doctrine evolved into the modern concepts of fair use and fair dealing . Fair use
3536-739: A use from being found fair, even though it makes it less likely. Likewise, the noncommercial purpose of a use makes it more likely to be found a fair use, but it does not make it a fair use automatically. For instance, in L.A. Times v. Free Republic , the court found that the noncommercial use of Los Angeles Times content by the Free Republic website was not fair use, since it allowed the public to obtain material at no cost that they would otherwise pay for. Richard Story similarly ruled in Code Revision Commission and State of Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org , Inc. that despite
3672-417: A work (except the license itself) may only be modified and distributed under the terms of the work's copyleft license. Partial copyleft, by contrast, exempts some parts of the work from the copyleft provisions, permitting distribution of some modifications under terms other than the copyleft license, or in some other way does not impose all the principles of copylefting on the work. An example of partial copyleft
3808-472: A work against adverse criticism. As explained by Judge Leval, courts are permitted to include additional factors in their analysis. One such factor is acknowledgement of the copyrighted source. Giving the name of the photographer or author may help, but it does not automatically make a use fair. While plagiarism and copyright infringement are related matters, they are not identical. Plagiarism (using someone's words, ideas, images, etc. without acknowledgment)
3944-552: A work does not bar a finding of fair use. It simply makes the third factor less favorable to the defendant. For instance, in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. copying entire television programs for private viewing was upheld as fair use, at least when the copying is done for the purposes of time-shifting . In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation , the Ninth Circuit held that copying an entire photo to use as
4080-410: A work the freedom and permission to reproduce, adapt , or distribute it, copyleft licenses are distinct from other types of copyright licenses that limit such freedoms. Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain , where no ownership of copyright is claimed, copyleft allows authors to impose restrictions on the use of their work. One of the main restrictions imposed by copyleft
4216-490: A work under copyleft usually must gain, defer, or assign copyright holder status. By submitting the copyright of their contributions under a copyleft license, they deliberately give up some of the rights that normally follow from copyright, including the right to be the unique distributor of copies of the work. Some laws used for copyleft licenses vary from one country to another, and may also be granted in terms that vary from country to country. For example, in some countries, it
GNU Free Documentation License - Misplaced Pages Continue
4352-434: Is a matter of professional ethics, while copyright is a matter of law, and protects exact expression, not ideas. One can plagiarize even a work that is not protected by copyright, for example by passing off a line from Shakespeare as one's own. Conversely, attribution prevents accusations of plagiarism, but it does not prevent infringement of copyright. For example, reprinting a copyrighted book without permission, while citing
4488-757: Is a mirrored version of the copyright symbol , © : a reversed C in a circle. A 2016 proposal to add the symbol to a future version of Unicode was accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee . The code point U+1F12F 🄯 COPYLEFT SYMBOL was added in Unicode 11 . The copyleft symbol has no legal status. As of 2024, the symbol is generally provided as standard in the system fonts of most current operating systems , but if need be it may be approximated with character U+2184 ↄ LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED C between parenthesis (ɔ) . On modern computer systems,
4624-555: Is acceptable to sell a software product without warranty, in standard GNU General Public License style, while in most European countries it is not permitted for a software distributor to waive all warranties regarding a sold product. For this reason, the extent of such warranties is specified in most European copyleft licenses, for example, the European Union Public Licence (EUPL), or the CeCILL license ,
4760-531: Is classified as an 'affirmative defense,' we hold—for the purposes of the DMCA—fair use is uniquely situated in copyright law so as to be treated differently than traditional affirmative defenses. We conclude that because 17 U.S.C. § 107 created a type of non-infringing use, fair use is "authorized by the law" and a copyright holder must consider the existence of fair use before sending a takedown notification under § 512(c)." In June 2011, Judge Philip Pro of
4896-504: Is considered a fair use. 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 they may sell their review commercially; but
5032-711: Is copyleft under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Li-Chen Wang 's Palo Alto Tiny BASIC for the Intel 8080 appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal in May 1976. The listing begins with the title, author's name, and date, but also has "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED". The concept of copyleft was described in Richard Stallman 's GNU Manifesto in 1985, where he wrote: GNU
5168-401: Is determined by the extent to which its provisions can be imposed on all kinds of derivative works. Thus, the term "weak copyleft" refers to licenses where not all derivative works inherit the copyleft license; whether a derivative work inherits or not often depends on how it was derived. "Weak copyleft" licenses are often used to cover software libraries . This allows other software to link to
5304-427: Is more important than a copyleft. Common practice for using copyleft is to codify the copying terms for a work with a license . Any such license typically includes all the provisions and principles of copyleft inside the license's terms. This includes the freedom to use the work, study the work, copy, and share the work with others, modify the work, and distribute exact or modified versions of that work, with or without
5440-508: Is more similar in principle to the enumerated exceptions found under civil law systems. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright. In response to perceived over-expansion of copyrights, several electronic civil liberties and free expression organizations began in the 1990s to add fair use cases to their dockets and concerns. These include the Electronic Frontier Foundation ("EFF"),
5576-479: Is no reason to believe the GPL could force proprietary software to become free software, but could "try to enjoin the firm from distributing commercially a program that combined with the GPL'd code to form a derivative work, and to recover damages for infringement." If the firm "actually copied code from a GPL'd program, such a suit would be a perfectly ordinary assertion of copyright, which most private firms would defend if
GNU Free Documentation License - Misplaced Pages Continue
5712-400: Is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free. Stallman's motivation was that a few years earlier he had worked on a Lisp interpreter. Symbolics asked to use
5848-421: Is that derived works must also be released under a compatible copyleft license. This is due to the underlying principle of copyleft: that anyone can benefit freely from the previous work of others, but that any modifications to that work should benefit everyone else as well, and thus must be released under similar terms. For this reason, copyleft licenses are also known as reciprocal licenses: any modifiers of
5984-525: Is that not everyone wants to share their work, and some share-alike agreements require that the whole body of work be shared, even if the author only wants to share a certain part. The plus side for an author of source code is that any modification to the code will not only benefit the original author but that the author will be recognized and ensure the same or compatible license terms cover the changed code. Some Creative Commons licenses are examples of share-alike copyleft licenses. Those licenses grant users of
6120-496: Is the GPL linking exception made for some software packages. The " share-alike " condition in some licenses imposes the requirement that any freedom that is granted regarding the original work must be granted on exactly the same or compatible terms in any derived work. This implies that any copyleft license is automatically a share-alike license but not the other way around, as some share-alike licenses include further restrictions such as prohibiting commercial use. Another restriction
6256-463: Is the extent to which the use is transformative . In the 1994 decision Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc , the U.S. Supreme Court held that when the purpose of the use is transformative, this makes the first factor more likely to favor fair use. Before the Campbell decision, federal Judge Pierre Leval argued that transformativeness is central to the fair use analysis in his 1990 article, Toward
6392-639: Is transformative. For instance, in Seltzer v. Green Day, Inc., 725 F.3d 1170 (9th Cir. 2013), the court found that Green Day's use of Seltzer's copyrighted Scream Icon was transformative. The court held that Green Day's modifications to the original Scream Icon conveyed new information and aesthetics from the original piece. Conversely, the Second Circuit came to the opposite conclusion in a similar situation in Andy Warhol Foundation for
6528-593: Is undisputed that Hoehn posted the entire work in his comment on the Website. ... wholesale copying does not preclude a finding of fair use. ... there is no genuine issue of material fact that Hoehn's use of the Work was fair and summary judgment is appropriate." On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Righthaven did not even have the standing needed to sue Hoehn for copyright infringement in
6664-1013: The American Civil Liberties Union , the National Coalition Against Censorship , the American Library Association , numerous clinical programs at law schools, and others. The " Chilling Effects " archive was established in 2002 as a coalition of several law school clinics and the EFF to document the use of cease and desist letters. In 2006 Stanford University began an initiative called the " Fair Use Project " (FUP) to help artists, particularly filmmakers, fight lawsuits brought against them by large corporations. Examples of fair use in United States copyright law include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody , news reporting, research, and scholarship. Fair use provides for
6800-589: The Debian project, Thomas Bushnell , Nathanael Nerode, and Bruce Perens have raised objections. Bruce Perens saw the GFDL even outside the "Free Software ethos": "FSF, a Free Software organization, isn't being entirely true to the Free Software ethos while it is promoting a license that allows invariant sections to be applied to anything but the license text and attribution. [...] the GFDL isn't consistent with
6936-646: The District of Nevada ruled in Righthaven v. Hoehn that the posting of an entire editorial article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a comment as part of an online discussion was unarguably fair use. Judge Pro noted that "Noncommercial, nonprofit use is presumptively fair. ... Hoehn posted the Work as part of an online discussion. ... This purpose is consistent with comment, for which 17 U.S.C. § 107 provides fair use protection. ... It
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#17327836629307072-479: The GNU General Public License (GPL), originally written by Richard Stallman , which was the first software copyleft license to see extensive use; the Mozilla Public License ; the Free Art License ; and the Creative Commons share-alike license condition —with the last two being intended for non-software works, such as documents and pictures, both academic or artistic in nature. Misplaced Pages
7208-552: The GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License . The GNU General Public License is an example of a license implementing strong copyleft. An even stronger copyleft license is the AGPL , which requires the publishing of the source code for software as a service use cases. The Sybase Open Watcom Public License is one of the strongest copyleft licenses, as this license closes
7344-535: The 80s when we first made the GNU Manifesto an invariant section in the Emacs Manual, was to make sure they could not be removed. Specifically, to make sure that distributors of Emacs that also distribute non-free software could not remove the statements of our philosophy, which they might think of doing because those statements criticize their actions. The GNU FDL is incompatible in both directions with
7480-542: The Copyright Act of 1976, which is codified at 17 U.S.C. § 107 . They were intended by Congress to clarify rather than to replace, the prior judge-made law. As Judge Pierre N. Leval has written, the statute does not "define or explain [fair use's] contours or objectives." While it "leav[es] open the possibility that other factors may bear on the question, the statute identifies none." That is, courts are entitled to consider other factors in addition to
7616-487: The Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially" and therefore is incompatible with material that excludes commercial re-use. As mentioned above, the GFDL was designed with commercial publishers in mind, as Stallman explained: The GFDL is meant as a way to enlist commercial publishers in funding free documentation without surrendering any vital liberty. The 'cover text' feature, and certain other aspects of
7752-457: The Document". This means that if a licensee prints out a copy of an article whose text is covered under the GNU FDL, they must also include a copyright notice and a physical printout of the GNU FDL, which is a significantly large document in itself. Worse, the same is required for the standalone use of just one (for example, Misplaced Pages) image. Several Wikimedia projects have over the years abandoned
7888-527: The Document, but exist as front-matter materials or appendices. Secondary sections can contain information regarding the author's or publisher's relationship to the subject matter, but not any subject matter itself. While the Document itself is wholly editable and is essentially covered by a license equivalent to (but mutually incompatible with) the GNU General Public License , some of the secondary sections have various restrictions designed primarily to deal with proper attribution to previous authors. Specifically,
8024-619: The FSF asserts it does not and explicitly adds an exception allowing it in the license for the GNU Classpath re-implementation of the Java library. This ambiguity is an important difference between the GPL and the LGPL , in that the LGPL specifically allows linking or compiling works licensed under terms that are not compatible with the LGPL, with works covered by the LGPL. The copyleft symbol
8160-523: The GFDL if such fair use is covered by all potential subsequent uses. One example of such liberal and commercial fair use is parody . Although the two licenses work on similar copyleft principles, the GFDL is not compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license . However, at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation , version 1.3 added a time-limited section allowing specific types of websites using
8296-433: The GFDL in a court of law, although its sister license for software, the GNU General Public License , has been successfully enforced in such a setting. Although the content of Misplaced Pages has been plagiarized and used in violation of the GFDL by other sites, such as Baidu Baike , no contributors have ever tried to bring an organization to court due to violation of the GFDL. In the case of Baidu, Misplaced Pages representatives asked
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#17327836629308432-500: The GFDL to additionally offer their work under the CC BY-SA license. These exemptions allow a GFDL-based collaborative project with multiple authors to transition to the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, without first obtaining the permission of every author, if the work satisfies several conditions: To prevent the clause from being used as a general compatibility measure, the license itself only allowed the change to occur before August 1, 2009. At
8568-464: The GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it." In another context, Steve Ballmer declared that code released under GPL is useless to the commercial sector, since it can only be used if the resulting surrounding code is licensed under a GPL-compatible license, and described it thus as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". In response to Microsoft's attacks on
8704-433: The GPL, several prominent free-software developers and advocates released a joint statement supporting the license. According to FSF compliance engineer David Turner, the term "viral license" creates a misunderstanding and a fear of using copylefted free software. While a person can catch a virus without active action, license conditions take effect upon effective usage or adoption. David McGowan has also written that there
8840-594: The GPL—material under the GNU FDL cannot be put into GPL code and GPL code cannot be put into a GNU FDL manual. At the June 22–23, 2006 international GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, Eben Moglen hinted that a future version of the GPL could be made suitable for documentation: By expressing LGPL as just an additional permission on top of GPL we simplify our licensing landscape drastically. It's like for physics getting rid of
8976-485: The Lisp interpreter, and Stallman agreed to supply them with a public domain version of his work. Symbolics extended and improved the Lisp interpreter, but when Stallman wanted access to the improvements that Symbolics had made to his interpreter, Symbolics refused. Stallman then, in 1984, proceeded to work towards eradicating this emerging behavior and culture of proprietary software , which he named software hoarding . This
9112-492: The Second Circuit in Cariou v. Prince , 714 F.3d 694 (2d. Cir. 2013) shed light on how transformative use is determined. "What is critical is how the work in question appears to the reasonable observer, not simply what an artist might say about a particular piece or body of work." The district court's conclusion that Prince's work was not transformative is partly based on Prince's deposition testimony that he "do[es]n't really have
9248-493: The U.S. Supreme Court held that a news article's quotation of fewer than 400 words from President Ford 's 200,000-word memoir was sufficient to make the third fair use factor weigh against the defendants, because the portion taken was the "heart of the work". This use was ultimately found not to be fair. The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work. The court not only investigates whether
9384-442: The U.S., fair use right/exception is based on a flexible proportionality test that examines the purpose of the use, the amount used, and the impact on the market of the original work. The doctrine of "fair use" originated in common law during the 18th and 19th centuries as a way of preventing copyright law from being too rigidly applied and "stifling the very creativity which [copyright] law is designed to foster." Though originally
9520-617: The Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 11 F.4th 26 (2d. Cir. 2021). In that case, the Warhol Foundation sought a declaratory judgment that Warhol's use of one of Goldsmith's celebrity photographs was fair use. The court held that Warhol's use was not transformative because Warhol merely imposed his own style on Goldsmith's photograph and retained the photograph's essential elements. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that
9656-570: The artist) into American copyright law as "bizarre and contradictory" because it sometimes grants greater protection to works that were created for private purposes that have little to do with the public goals of copyright law, than to those works that copyright was initially conceived to protect. This is not to claim that unpublished works, or, more specifically, works not intended for publication, do not deserve legal protection, but that any such protection should come from laws about privacy, rather than laws about copyright. The statutory fair use provision
9792-542: The authors of prior versions have to be acknowledged and certain "invariant sections" specified by the original author and dealing with his or her relationship to the subject matter may not be changed. If the material is modified, its title has to be changed (unless the prior authors permit to retain the title). The license also has provisions for the handling of front-cover and back-cover texts of books, as well as for "History", "Acknowledgements", "Dedications" and "Endorsements" sections. These features were added in part to make
9928-493: The availability of both types of licenses, copyleft and permissive, allow authors to choose the type under which to license the works they invent. For documents, art, and other works other than software and code, the Creative Commons share-alike licensing system and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) allow authors to apply limitations to certain sections of their work, exempting some parts of
10064-434: The availability of copyright protection should not depend on the artistic quality or merit of a work, fair use analyses consider certain aspects of the work to be relevant, such as whether it is fictional or non-fictional. To prevent the private ownership of work that rightfully belongs in the public domain, facts and ideas are not protected by copyright —only their particular expression or fixation merits such protection. On
10200-429: The case matter was narrowed down to whether Google's use of the definition and SSO of Oracle's Java APIs (determined to be copyrightable) was within fair use. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against Google, stating that while Google could defend its use in the nature of the copyrighted work, its use was not transformative, and more significantly, it commercially harmed Oracle as they were also seeking entry to
10336-490: The character U+1F12F 🄯 COPYLEFT SYMBOL can be generated using one of these methods ( keyboard shortcuts ): Fair use Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests of copyright holders with
10472-456: The communication is abstract, such as executing a command-line tool with a set of switches or interacting with a web server. As a consequence, even if one module of an otherwise non-copyleft product is placed under the GPL, it may still be legal for other components to communicate with it in ways such as these. This allowed communication may or may not include reusing libraries or routines via dynamic linking – some commentators say it does,
10608-406: The court clarified that this is not a "hard evidentiary presumption" and that even the tendency that commercial purpose will "weigh against a finding of fair use ... will vary with the context." The Campbell court held that hip-hop group 2 Live Crew 's parody of the song " Oh, Pretty Woman " was fair use, even though the parody was sold for profit. Thus, having a commercial purpose does not preclude
10744-457: The creation of the thumbnails. To the contrary, the thumbnail searches could increase the exposure of the originals. In looking at all these factors as a whole, the court found that the thumbnails were fair use and remanded the case to the lower court for trial after issuing a revised opinion on July 7, 2003. The remaining issues were resolved with a default judgment after Arriba Soft had experienced significant financial problems and failed to reach
10880-454: The defendant's right to freedom of speech , and that possibility has prompted some jurisdictions to pass anti-SLAPP legislation that raises the plaintiff's burdens and risk. Although fair use ostensibly permits certain uses without liability, many content creators and publishers try to avoid a potential court battle by seeking a legally unnecessary license from copyright owners for any use of non-public domain material, even in situations where
11016-474: The defendant's specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's market, but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the infringement on commercial use of the work. For example, in Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios , the copyright owner, Universal , failed to provide any empirical evidence that
11152-450: The entertainment industry. This prompted him to invoke the fair use doctrine, which permits limited use of copyrighted material to provide analysis and criticism of published works. In 2009, fair use appeared as a defense in lawsuits against filesharing . Charles Nesson argued that file-sharing qualifies as fair use in his defense of alleged filesharer Joel Tenenbaum . Kiwi Camara , defending alleged filesharer Jammie Thomas , announced
11288-450: The ethos that FSF has promoted for 19 years." In 2006, Debian developers voted to consider works licensed under the GFDL to comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines provided that the invariant section clauses are not used. However, their resolution stated that even without invariant sections, GFDL-licensed software documentation is considered to be "still not free of trouble" by the project, namely because of its incompatibility with
11424-669: The fact that it is a non-profit and did not sell the work, the service profited from its unauthorized publication of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated because of "the attention, recognition, and contributions" it received in association with the work. Another factor is whether the use fulfills any of the preamble purposes, also mentioned in the legislation above, as these have been interpreted as "illustrative" of transformative use. In determining that Prince's appropriation art could constitute fair use and that many of his works were transformative fair uses of Cariou's photographs,
11560-417: The fact that the GFDL "does not allow for easy duplication and modification", especially for digital documentation. The GNU FDL contains the statement: You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. A criticism of this language is that it is too broad, because it applies to private copies made but not distributed. This means that
11696-498: The factors to be considered shall include: The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors. The four factors of analysis for fair use set forth above derive from the opinion of Joseph Story in Folsom v. Marsh , in which the defendant had copied 353 pages from the plaintiff's 12-volume biography of George Washington in order to produce
11832-404: The fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use
11968-830: The film in a history book on the subject in Time Inc v. Bernard Geis Associates . In the decisions of the Second Circuit in Salinger v. Random House and in New Era Publications Int'l v. Henry Holt & Co , the aspect of whether the copied work has been previously published was considered crucial, assuming the right of the original author to control the circumstances of the publication of his work or preference not to publish at all. However, Judge Pierre N. Leval views this importation of certain aspects of France's droit moral d'artiste ( moral rights of
12104-503: The film's use of their footage, specifically footage of the firefighters discussing the collapse of the World Trade Center . With the help of an intellectual property lawyer, the creators of Loose Change successfully argued that a majority of the footage used was for historical purposes and was significantly transformed in the context of the film. They agreed to remove a few shots that were used as B-roll and served no purpose to
12240-402: The first fair use factor. The Campbell case also addressed the subfactor mentioned in the quotation above, "whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes." In an earlier case, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. , the Supreme Court had stated that "every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively ... unfair." In Campbell ,
12376-458: The four statutory factors. The first factor is "the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes." To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new. In the 1841 copyright case Folsom v. Marsh , Justice Joseph Story wrote: "[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from
12512-419: The greater discussion. The case was settled and a potential multimillion-dollar lawsuit was avoided. This Film Is Not Yet Rated also relied on fair use to feature several clips from copyrighted Hollywood productions. The director had originally planned to license these clips from their studio owners but discovered that studio licensing agreements would have prohibited him from using this material to criticize
12648-422: The legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor test . The U.S. Supreme Court has traditionally characterized fair use as an affirmative defense , but in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. (2015) (the "dancing baby" case), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that fair use was not merely a defense to an infringement claim, but
12784-558: The library and be redistributed without the requirement for the linking software to also be licensed under the same terms. Only changes to the software licensed under a "weak copyleft" license become subject itself to copyleft provisions of such a license. This allows programs of any license to be compiled and linked against copylefted libraries such as glibc and then redistributed without any re-licensing required. The concrete effect of strong vs. weak copyleft has yet to be tested in court. Free-software licenses that use "weak" copyleft include
12920-408: The license more financially attractive to commercial publishers of software documentation, some of whom were consulted during the drafting of the GFDL. "Endorsements" sections are intended to be used in official standard documents, where the distribution of modified versions should only be permitted if they are not labeled as that standard anymore. The GFDL requires the ability to "copy and distribute
13056-486: The license that deal with covers, title page, history, and endorsements, are included to make the license appealing to commercial publishers for books whose authors are paid. Material that restricts commercial re-use is incompatible with the license and cannot be incorporated into the work. However, incorporating such restricted material may be fair use under United States copyright law (or fair dealing in some other countries) and does not need to be licensed to fall within
13192-431: The license, which includes a new provision allowing certain materials released under the (GFDL) license to be used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license also. Material licensed under the current version of the license can be used for any purpose, as long as the use meets certain conditions. The license explicitly separates any kind of "Document" from "Secondary Sections", which may not be integrated with
13328-438: The licensee to distribute derivative works under the same license. There is an ongoing debate as to which class of license provides the greater degree of freedom. This debate hinges on complex issues, such as the definition of freedom and whose freedoms are more important: the potential future recipients of a work (freedom from proprietization) or just the initial recipient (freedom to proprietize). However, current copyright law and
13464-465: The major free software licenses. Those opposed to the GFDL have recommended the use of alternative licenses such as the BSD License or the GNU GPL. The FLOSS Manuals foundation, an organization devoted to creating manuals for free software, decided to eschew the GFDL in favor of the GPL for its texts in 2007, citing the incompatibility between the two, difficulties in implementing the GFDL, and
13600-480: The mobile market. However, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed this decision, deciding that Google's actions satisfy all four tests for fair use, and that granting Oracle exclusive rights to use Java APIs on mobile markets "would interfere with, not further, copyright's basic creativity objectives." In April 2006, the filmmakers of the Loose Change series were served with a lawsuit by Jules and Gédéon Naudet over
13736-578: The music company had acted in bad faith by ordering removal of a video that represented fair use of the song. On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a copyright owner must affirmatively consider whether the complained of conduct constituted fair use before sending a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, rather than waiting for the alleged infringer to assert fair use. 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015). "Even if, as Universal urges, fair use
13872-438: The original artwork was. Second, the photographs had already been published, diminishing the significance of their nature as creative works. Third, although normally making a "full" replication of a copyrighted work may appear to violate copyright, here it was found to be reasonable and necessary in light of the intended use. Lastly, the court found that the market for the original photographs would not be substantially diminished by
14008-464: The original author, would be copyright infringement but not plagiarism. The U.S. Supreme Court described fair use as an affirmative defense in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. This means that in litigation on copyright infringement, the defendant bears the burden of raising and proving that the use was fair and not an infringement. Thus, fair use need not even be raised as a defense unless
14144-602: The original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient. The GFDL was designed for manuals , textbooks, other reference and instructional materials, and documentation which often accompanies GNU software. However, it can be used for any text-based work, regardless of subject matter. For example, the free online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages uses the GFDL (coupled with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License ) for much of its text, excluding text that
14280-422: The original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy ." A key consideration in later fair use cases
14416-403: The other hand, the social usefulness of freely available information can weigh against the appropriateness of copyright for certain fixations. The Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy , for example, was purchased and copyrighted by Time magazine. Yet its copyright was not upheld, in the name of the public interest, when Time tried to enjoin the reproduction of stills from
14552-482: The plaintiff first shows (or the defendant concedes) a prima facie case of copyright infringement. If the work was not copyrightable, the term had expired, or the defendant's work borrowed only a small amount , for instance, then the plaintiff cannot make out a prima facie case of infringement, and the defendant need not even raise the fair use defense. In addition, fair use is only one of many limitations, exceptions, and defenses to copyright infringement. Thus,
14688-460: The public interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works by allowing as a defense to copyright infringement claims certain limited uses that might otherwise be considered infringement. The U.S. "fair use doctrine" is generally broader than the " fair dealing " rights known in most countries that inherited English Common Law . The fair use right is a general exception that applies to all different kinds of uses with all types of works. In
14824-427: The quality of their software to compete with free software. This may also have the effect of preventing monopolies in areas dominated by proprietary software. However, competition with proprietary software can also be a reason to forgo copyleft. The Free Software Foundation recommends that when "widespread use of the code is vital for advancing the cause of free software", allowing the code to be copied and used freely
14960-526: The release of version 1.3, the FSF stated that all content added before November 1, 2008, to Misplaced Pages as an example satisfied the conditions. The Wikimedia Foundation itself after a public referendum, invoked this process to dual-license content released under the GFDL under the CC BY-SA license in June 2009, and adopted a foundation-wide attribution policy for the use of content from Wikimedia Foundation projects. There have currently been no cases involving
15096-679: The requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works . In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software , to documents , art , and scientific discoveries, and similar approaches have even been applied to certain patents . Copyleft software licenses are considered protective or reciprocal in contrast with permissive free software licenses , and require that information necessary for reproducing and modifying
15232-442: The results weighed together, in light of the purposes of copyright" has helped modulate this emphasis in interpretation. In evaluating the fourth factor, courts often consider two kinds of harm to the potential market for the original work. Courts recognize that certain kinds of market harm do not negate fair use, such as when a parody or negative review impairs the market of the original work. Copyright considerations may not shield
15368-411: The shoe were on the other foot." Richard Stallman has described this view with an analogy, saying, "The GPL's domain does not spread by proximity or contact, only by deliberate inclusion of GPL-covered code in your program. It spreads like a spider plant , not like a virus." Popular copyleft licenses, such as the GPL, have a clause allowing components to interact with non-copyleft components as long as
15504-416: The site and its contributors to respect the terms of the licenses and to make proper attributions. Some critics consider the GFDL a non-free license. Some reasons for this are that the GFDL allows "invariant" text which cannot be modified or removed, and that its prohibition against digital rights management (DRM) systems applies to valid usages, like for "private copies made and not distributed". Notably,
15640-550: The so-called "private usage" loophole of the GPL, and requires the publishing of source code in any use case. For this reason, the license is considered non-free by the Free Software Foundation , the GNU Project , and the Debian project. However, the license is accepted as open source by the OSI . The Design Science License (DSL) is a strong copyleft license that applies to any work, not only software or documentation, but also literature, artworks, music, photography, and video. DSL
15776-490: The software the same freedoms as copyleft licenses but do not require modified versions of that software to also include those freedoms. They have minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, and are thus not copyleft licenses. Examples of this type of license include the X11 license , Apache license , Expat license , and the various BSD licenses . It has been suggested that copyleft has become
15912-698: The software. Some creators, such as Elastic , feel that preventing commercial enterprises from using and then selling their product under a proprietary license is also an incentive. Furthermore, the open-source culture of programming has been described as a gift economy , where social power is determined by an individual's contributions. Contributing to or creating open-source, copyleft-licensed software of high quality can lead to contributors gaining valuable experience and can lead to future career opportunities. Copyleft software has economic effects beyond individual creators. The presence of quality copyleft software can force proprietary software developers to increase
16048-466: The use of Betamax had either reduced their viewership or negatively impacted their business. In Harper & Row, the case regarding President Ford's memoirs, the Supreme Court labeled the fourth factor "the single most important element of fair use" and it has enjoyed some level of primacy in fair use analyses ever since. Yet the Supreme Court's more recent announcement in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc that "all [four factors] are to be explored, and
16184-492: The use of GFDL, among them the English Misplaced Pages, which has relicensed the files. Wikivoyage , a web site dedicated to free content travel guides, chose not to use the GFDL from the beginning because it considers it unsuitable for short printed texts. Copyleft Higher categories: Software , freedom Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with
16320-546: The use of application programming interfaces (APIs) used to define functionality of the Java programming language, created by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle Corporation. Google used the APIs' definition and their structure, sequence and organization (SSO) in creating the Android operating system to support the mobile device market. Oracle had sued Google in 2010 over both patent and copyright violations, but after two cycles,
16456-425: The use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy ... In short, we must often ... look to the nature and objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used, and the degree in which the use may prejudice the sale, or diminish the profits, or supersede the objects, of the original work. The statutory fair use factors quoted above come from
16592-635: The video on YouTube . Four months later, Universal Music , the owner of the copyright to the song, ordered YouTube to remove the video under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act . Lenz notified YouTube immediately that her video was within the scope of fair use, and she demanded that it be restored. YouTube complied after six weeks, rather than the two weeks required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lenz then sued Universal Music in California for her legal costs, claiming
16728-525: The work and its derivatives to be provided in a form that allows further modifications to be made. In software , this means requiring that the source code of the derived work be made available together with the software itself. The economic incentives to work on copyleft content can vary. Traditional copyright law is designed to promote progress by providing economic benefits to creators. When choosing to copyleft their work, content creators may seek complementary benefits like recognition from their peers. In
16864-402: The work from the full copyleft mechanism. In the case of the GFDL, these limitations include the use of invariant sections, which may not be altered by future editors. The initial intention of the GFDL was as a device for supporting the documentation of copylefted software. However, the result is that it can be used for any kind of document. The strength of the copyleft license governing a work
17000-464: The work must be made available to recipients of the software program, which are often distributed as executables . This information is most commonly in the form of source code files, which usually contain a copy of the license terms and acknowledge the authors of the code. Copyleft helps ensure everyone's rights to freely use the product but it prohibits owning, registering copyright and earning royalties from copyright. Notable copyleft licenses include
17136-632: The work the freedom to carry out all of these activities. These freedoms (from the Free Software Definition ) include: Similar terms are present in the Open Source Definition , a separate definition that contains similar freedoms. The vast majority of copyleft licenses satisfy both definitions, that of the Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition. By guaranteeing viewers and users of
17272-494: The world of computer programming, copyleft-licensed computer programs are often created by programmers to fill a need they have noticed. Such programs are often published with a copyleft license simply to ensure that subsequent users can also freely use modified versions of that program. This is especially true for creators who wish to prevent "open source hijacking", or the act of reusing open-source code and then adding extra restrictions to it, an action prevented by copyleft-licensing
17408-540: The wrongs he perceived it to perpetuate, he decided to work within the framework of existing law; in 1985, he created his own copyright license, the Emacs General Public License, the first copyleft license. This later evolved into the GNU General Public License , which is now one of the most popular free-software licenses. For the first time, a copyright holder had taken steps to ensure that the maximal number of rights be perpetually transferred to
17544-504: Was a common-law (i.e. created by judges as a legal precedent ) doctrine in the U.S. until it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976 , 17 U.S.C. § 107 . The term "fair use" originated in the United States. Although related, the limitations and exceptions to copyright for teaching and library archiving in the U.S. are located in a different section of the statute. A similar-sounding principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions but in fact it
17680-453: Was amended in response to these concerns by adding a final sentence: "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors." The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair. Using most or all of
17816-429: Was an expressly authorized right, and an exception to the exclusive rights granted to the author of a creative work by copyright law: "Fair use is therefore distinct from affirmative defenses where a use infringes a copyright, but there is no liability due to a valid excuse, e.g., misuse of a copyright." Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A ,
17952-600: Was found not to be fair use. That decision was appealed and contested by Internet rights activists such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation , who argued that it was fair use. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of the defendant, Arriba Soft. In reaching its decision, the court utilized the statutory four-factor analysis. First, it found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative, noting that they were not meant to be viewed at high resolution as
18088-662: Was imported from other sources after the 2009 licensing update that is only available under the Creative Commons license. The GFDL was released in draft form for feedback in September 1999. After revisions, version 1.1 was issued in March 2000, version 1.2 in November 2002, and version 1.3 in November 2008. The current state of the license is version 1.3. On December 1, 2007, Misplaced Pages founder Jimmy Wales announced that
18224-436: Was not the first time Stallman had dealt with proprietary software, but he deemed this interaction a "turning point". He justified software sharing, protesting that when sharing, the software online can be copied without the loss of the original piece of work. The software can be used multiple times without ever being damaged or worn out. As Stallman deemed it impractical in the short term to eliminate current copyright law and
18360-502: Was released. The name 'viral license' refers to the fact that any works derived from a copyleft work must preserve the copyleft permissions when distributed. Some advocates of the various BSD Licenses used the term derisively in regards to the GPL's tendency to absorb BSD-licensed code without allowing the original BSD work to benefit from it, while at the same time promoting itself as "freer" than other licenses. Microsoft vice-president Craig Mundie remarked, "This viral aspect of
18496-408: Was written by Michael Stutz after he took an interest in applying GNU-style copyleft to non-software works, which later came to be called libre works . In the 1990s, it was used on music recordings, visual art, and even novels. It is not considered compatible with the GNU GPL by the Free Software Foundation. "Full" and "partial" copyleft relate to another issue. Full copyleft exists when all parts of
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