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- U.S. copyright law provides for "fair use" of copyrighted materials without payment or permission in certain circumstances, which are often associated with non-profit research, teaching, and scholarship.
- Generally this means that you can reproduce portions of a work without securing copyright permission from the publisher and/or author.
- Fair use is a flexible doctrine based on the weighing of four factors - the purpose of the use, the nature of the work used, the amount used, and the effect of the use on the market for the work.
- Recent case law has held that fair use will be judged in light of purpose.
- For sufficiently new or transformative purposes, quite a lot of a copyrighted work can be used.
- Old guidelines that emphasized counting words or calculated pre-determined percentages of a given work are no longer useful.
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