ABSTRACT
Under copyright law, fair use allows limited uses of a copyrighted work, without the holder's consent, for purposes of criticism, scholarship, news reporting, and education. This chapter discusses the economic model to answer the crucial question that concerns where the "limit" of these allowed uses should be set. This model then applied to the examination of several fair use cases. The lesson from these cases provided is that courts continually need to revisit the scope of fair use in the face of technological changes that lower the cost and raise the quality of potentially infringing uses. The Copyright Act specifies the following factors as being relevant for determining fair use: the purpose and character of the use; the nature of the original work; the amount of material used in relation to the original; and the effect of the use on the value of the copyright.
