A Research On The Fair Use Problems In Digital Libraries

This thesis, by discussing several influential digital library cases, raises three questions as follows: (1) What is the legal nature of digital libraries? (2) Is a digital library's behavior, such as digitizing in-copyright works, providing online access to full texts of these digitized works or providing snippets of these digitized works, an infringement of copyright or a fair use? (3) Is a reform of the fair use rule necessary under the digital circumstance so as to meet the digital libraries'need of using in-copyright works?The whole thesis, including four parts, discusses the three questions above and then comes to the following conclusions:Firstly, whether a digital library is a commonweal organization or not should not be judged only by the fact that whether or not the users being charged by it. There will be no doubt that a digital library is a commonweal organization if the fees charged from the users are completely used to sustain the operation of a digital library or to provide better services. However, digital libraries are still developing. When judging whether those digital libraries which earn profits indirectly through providing public welfare services could constitute a fair use defense, we need further discussion.Secondly, a digital library which digitizes in-copyright works, provides online access to the digitized works and even permits others to download them infringes copyright holders'copyright. Though scanning the full texts of an in-copyright work is necessary to achieve precise searching results and only snippets of the work will be displayed, it is an infringement of copyright either. But this will do harm to the public's needs of accessing to information.Thirdly, it is necessary to reform the fair use rule so as to meet the dissemination and availability of information in a circumstance of the digital age. Firstly, we should set up a new principle of copyright protection, which emphasizes much more on dissemination right or distribution right than on copy right. And secondly, we may revise the fair use rule and relevant rules from the following angles: i. adding some new contents into current fair use rules; or adding a new fair use clause exclusively for digital libraries; and restricting the abuse of technological protection measures. ii. transforming the fair use rule to statutory license rule to some extent; iii. making collective administration of copyright system more efficiency; iv. adopting implied licensing rule.