ABSTRACT
For 150 years, fair use was a solely American doctrine. But in the 1990s and 2000s, the Philippines, Israel, and South Korea all adopted American-style fair use. Since then, debates have erupted over whether or not to introduce fair use into the copyright laws of a half dozen additional countries, including the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia. Why is fair use going global? What do innovators, scholars, and legislators see in the fair use doctrine? And what is tipping the scale in favor of or against fair use? We don’t yet know whether the global fair use movement will fizzle out or take over world intellectual property regimes. But looking at the debates over the global spread of fair use, even at this early stage, tells us a lot about digital media’s challenge to the regulation of both technological innovation and online expression.
