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In Friday’s decision in Cambridge University Press v. Patton, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit followed decades of jurisprudence in casting aside bright line rules for determining whether faculty made fair use of copyrighted material. This is regrettable, as the celebrated 2012 district court opinion in the same case had opened up the possibility of teaching faculty how to properly make fair use of material using plain terms and easy-to-understand concepts, while the appeals court opinion returns us to the days of case-by-case holistic analysis and detailed exceptions, loopholes, and caveats.
The case revolves around a challenge by several companies that published non-textbook scholarly works to Georgia State University’s electronic reserve systems, wherein faculty and librarians would scan in excerpts of books for students to access digitally, a technological improvement over the traditional practice of leaving a copy or two on reserve at the library circulation desk. The publishers claimed mass copyright infringement while Georgia State cited the fair use provisions of Section 107 of the Copyright Law.
The district court exhaustively analyzed each work uploaded to electronic reserves, finding only five in violation out of the dozens submitted by the publishing companies, by taking a new twist to the law’s four factors for analysis:
- The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- The nature of the copyrighted work;
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work.
Traditional fair use analysis calls for a case-by-case analysis of each potential use, independently weighing the four factors holistically, which is difficult and often requires knowledge of unavailable facts (such as the effect on the market of the work, which is nearly impossible for those outside of the company to guess at). (For instance, the Supreme Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. specifically discarded any use of “bright line rules” for determining fair use of copyrighted material.)
Judge Orinda Evans went a different route. She found that de minimis use (such as when a faculty member posts a work but no student ever accesses it) is not a violation, and that in most cases, using one chapter or 10 percent of a book that is under copyright protection would meet the fair use test. The judge decided to clearly assign winners in each of the four factors, and then give the overall win to the party with the majority of factors in their favor.
She wrote that factors one and two almost always went in favor of nonprofit higher educational use of academic works. While a determination of factor four may be difficult for a faculty member to determine, and would likely go in favor of the publishers, the judge ruled that 10 percent or one chapter of a work that is digitally available would meet the fair use test for factor three. Adding factors 1, 2, and 3 together let her find a majority and, thus, fair use, even without factor four.
Note that these findings were for those works that could be purchased digitally. In another section, the judge applied some behavioral economics to factor four by finding that for those works that a publisher did not make available digitally, a faculty member could use approximately 18 percent of the work and still win a fair use analysis. That larger limit of factor 3 could encourage publishers to make their works available at reasonable prices, so as to discourage fair use without remuneration.
This was a groundbreaking opinion that allowed intellectual property lawyers in higher education to clearly explain to administrators and faculty members which uses would and would not be fair. Rather than require our botany and geography professors to also become copyright scholars, we could provide them with reasonable tests to ensure they properly balanced the interests of students in accessing the content with the interest of publishers in compensation for developing the content. While this wasn’t the first effort to develop fair use standards, it was the clearest, and the first time that such standards were set by a court.
The appeals court rejected this analysis and found that the “District Court did not err in performing a work-by-work analysis of individual instances of alleged infringement in order to determine the need for injunctive relief. However, the District Court did err by giving each of the four fair use factors equal weight, and by treating the four factors mechanistically.”
The appeals court instead called for a return to the holistic analysis. Rejecting the 10 percent or one chapter bright-line rule, the appellate court wrote that “the District Court should have performed this analysis on a work-by-work basis, taking into account whether the amount taken -- qualitatively and quantitatively -- was reasonable in light of the pedagogical purpose of the use and the threat of market substitution.”
The appeals court decision stands on solid precedential ground, and it is not the first court to call for a holistic and case-by-case analysis. While one can defend that decision by looking to the past, the decision is a poor one for those who look to the future. As content becomes more available in varying formats, and our faculty, staff and students are faced with myriad opportunities to pay for content, make fair use, or violate copyrights of authors and creators, the presence of clear standards and easily digestible rules provided higher education with a fighting chance to educate our academic community and encourage proper balancing and fair (but not inappropriate) use of content.
William Patry and Melville Nimmer, the two seminal thinkers in copyright law, each devote hundreds of pages to explaining copyright law. Their sets of volumes, which cost thousands of dollars, provide a comprehensive analysis of fair use and all of its details. But these books and detailed analysis are well outside the scope of what we expect of our faculty members who do not specialize in intellectual property, and our instructors simply do not have the time to conduct an exhaustive analysis of each use, even if they did take the time to learn all the permutations of the fair use analysis. This isn’t to say that they can’t, but to state the reality that they won’t.
Frankly, the dueling decisions in these cases, and the numerous articles and statements by serious copyright scholars on both sides of this analysis, show that even those who steep themselves in the details of fair use can disagree on whether a certain use is fair or violative.
When intellectual property law experts cannot agree, we should not expect our history and math faculty to do justice to the fair use analysis each time.
Instead, faculty will divide into two camps. One group will “throw caution to the wind” and use whatever content they wish in whatever form they desire, hoping never to raise the ire of the publishing companies.
The other, out of an abundance of caution, will self-censor, and fail to make fair use of content for fear that they might step over a line they cannot possibly identify, and can never be certain of until a judge rules one way or the other. Either way, our students and the publishers lose out.
The district court opinion shed some light into the murky swamp of fair use analysis. The Eleventh Circuit opinion dims that light, and threatens to return us to a regime wherein faculty who are not experts in copyright law will either use without consideration of the law or self-censor, diminishing the utility of the concept of fair use.
The Constitution teaches that the purpose of copyright is to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” The district court opinion found that small excerpts available to students “would further the spread of knowledge.”
Arming faculty with clear rules and standards to properly balance fair use of content would go a long way toward achieving this goal.
