On October 17, 2014, The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals expounded upon the test used to determine the “fair use” exception to copyright protection. The district court initially held that faculty members’ use of certain electronic course reserves and electronic course sites to make excerpts from academic books available to students at Georgia State University (GSU) was “fair use.” AAUP submitted an amicus brief to the Circuit Court urging it to affirm the district court’s ruling and to clarify that a “transformative use” analysis may also be used to determine “fair use.” The Circuit Court reversed the district court’s decision, agreeing with much of the district court’s fair use analysis, but not with how it applied that analysis: “The District Court did err by giving each of the four fair use factors [purpose of the new use, the nature of the original work, the amount of the work being used, and the impact on the new use on the market for the original work] equal weight, and by treating the four factors mechanistically. The District Court should have undertaken a holistic analysis which carefully balanced the four factors.”
