Source: http://www.copyhype.com/2015/10/what-did-google-books-decision-do-to-cariou-v-prince/
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 23:07:32+00:00

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What Did Google Books Decision Do To Cariou v Prince?
posted October 21, 2015 by Terry Hart.
On Friday, the Second Circuit published its long-awaited decision in Authors Guild v. Google, holding that the Google Books project was fair use. The litigation has extended over a decade, and the court’s opinion ably recounts the factual and legal background so there is no need to repeat that here. Surely it will provide fodder for plenty of commentary over the coming months, but for now, I wanted to highlight an ancillary point: the court’s apparent overlook of its fair use holding in Cariou v. Prince.
To the contrary, the illustrative fair uses listed in the preamble to § 107—“criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching […], scholarship, [and] research”—all have at their core a focus on the original works or their historical context, and all of the precedent this Court can identify imposes a requirement that the new work in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works.
The New York Times noted that the decision was criticized by copyright experts and photographers. I also criticized the decision, and later wrote that it ignored a long-standing principle that fair use requires that the use of the original work is essential to the new work for some purpose related to those listed in the statute (“criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching […], scholarship, [and] research”). 3See also William F. Patry & Shira Perlmutter, Fair Use Misconstrued: Profit, Presumptions, and Parody, 11 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment L. J. 667, 714-15 (1992) (“If the defendant is commenting on something that has nothing to do with the plaintiff’s work, he has no need to use the plaintiff’s work to make that comment. He can equally well create his own expression, or use material in the public domain. … In the absence of a need to use that particular work, there is inadequate justification for carving out a substantial chunk of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights.”). This necessity principle, I observed, can be derived from the underlying justifications of fair use—which include furthering the goals of copyright itself and providing First Amendment safeguards.
There’s no good reason why defendants should be allowed to appropriate someone else’s copyrighted efforts as the starting point in their lampoon, when so many non-copyrighted alternatives (including snapshots they could have taken themselves) were available. The fair-use privilege under §107 is not designed to protect lazy appropriators. Its goal instead is to facilitate a class of uses that would not be possible if users always had to negotiate with copyright proprietors.
Following the Supreme Court’s denial of cert in Sconnie Nation, it seemed like we’d be stuck with a bit of a circuit split between the Seventh Circuit and the Second (and Ninth) Circuit. Until Authors Guild.
[T]he heart of any parodist’s claim to quote from existing material . . . is the use of . . . a prior author’s composition to . . .comment on that author’s works. . . . If, on the contrary, the commentary has no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition, which the alleged infringer merely uses to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh, the claim to fairness in borrowing from another’s work diminishes accordingly (if it does not vanish). . . . Parody needs to mimic an original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its victim’s . . . imagination, whereas satire can stand on its own two feet and so requires justification for the very act of borrowing.
In other words, the would-be fair user of another’s work must have justification for the taking. A secondary author is not necessarily at liberty to make wholesale takings of the original author’s expression merely because of how well the original author’s expression would convey the secondary author’s different message. Among the best recognized justifications for copying from another’s work is to provide comment on it or criticism of it. A taking from another author’s work for the purpose of making points that have no bearing on the original may well be fair use, but the taker would need to show a justification.
This would appear to contradict Cariou—there, Prince did not have any justification for using Cariou’s photos; indeed, he did not articulate any reason at all for using them, but the court nevertheless held that to be a fair use. I say appear to contradict since a panel court cannot overrule prior holdings by the same court, so we are left with a state of tension between the holdings in Cariou and Authors Guild.
Nevertheless, and setting aside other aspects of this decision, the Second Circuit’s recognition of the necessity requirement of fair use is a welcome one.
1. ↑ Cariou v. Prince, 784 F.Supp.2d 337 (SDNY 2011).
2. ↑ Cariou v. Prince, 714 F.3d 694, 706-07 (2nd Cir. 2013).
3. ↑ See also William F. Patry & Shira Perlmutter, Fair Use Misconstrued: Profit, Presumptions, and Parody, 11 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment L. J. 667, 714-15 (1992) (“If the defendant is commenting on something that has nothing to do with the plaintiff’s work, he has no need to use the plaintiff’s work to make that comment. He can equally well create his own expression, or use material in the public domain. … In the absence of a need to use that particular work, there is inadequate justification for carving out a substantial chunk of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights.”).
4. ↑ 766 F.3d 756 (7th Cir. 2014).
5. ↑ See Pierre N. Leval, Toward a Fair Use Standard, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105 (1990).

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