Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

In 2019, Professor Ginsburg delivered the Distinguished Visitor in Intellectual Property Lecture at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. Titled “Fair Use in the US: Transformed, Reformed, Deformed?”, the lecture explored US caselaw applying the statutory fair use exception, highlighting its excesses and apparent rebalancing. Four and half years (and a pandemic) later, the Supreme Court has rendered decisions in two fair use cases (Google v Oracle; Andy Warhol Foundation v Goldsmith). Together, these controversies prompt inquiry whether the Supreme Court has redrawn the landscape of US fair use and copyright law, expanding fair use for commercial use of functional computer code, but narrowing it for at least some exploitations of “appropriation art.” That inquiry extends to the fair use doctrine’s potential to accommodate massive inputs of copyrighted works into databases to enable “machine learning” by artificial intelligence systems.

Disciplines

Intellectual Property Law | Law

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