'Fair Use' In The Digital Age

The copyright law is a fundamental law protecting the copyright of authors of literary, artistic and scientific works and the rights related with the copyright. Its legislative intent is to encourage creation and dissemination of the works beneficial to construction of socialist spiritual and material civilization and promote development and prosperity of socialist culture and science. For this, highlighting protection of copyright owners' interests runs through the whole copyright law. However, the law always endevours to find a balance among conflicting interests and the copyright law is no exception. The provisions about restrictions on copyright in the copyright law are just reflecting such a balance. Among various restrictions on copyright, 'fair use' is the most eye-catching because it provides the users' act of utilizing works with the most forgiveness.This article begins with legislation on fair use in American law, Chinese law and international conventions and then inspects four traditional criteria for judging fair use. The first is purpose and character of the use, the second is nature of the work, the third is the proportional amount and substance of the use and the last is the effect on the original author's economic market. On the basis of brief introduction of fair use, the article points out that many great changes have placed in the field of copyright in the digital age. The methods of copying works become easier, the speed of disseminating works becomes quicker and the act of creating works becomes more widespread, which make copyright owners in unprecedented panic and make fair use in unprecedented question. Faced with the threaten to their own interests, copyright owners take prompt action, fighting with the act of utilizing works by means of network contracts, technical measures and so on, which greatly exclude fair use.Facing the question and exclusion from which fair use suffers, we have to think whether fair use has necessity and feasibility of existence in the digital age. For the necessity, the article gives a full exposition from the perspective of legal value, economics and social development in the chapter II, section I. For the feasibility, the article gives approaches to the conflict between fair use and network contracts and technical measures in the chapter II, section II.After analyzing necessity and feasibility of existence of fair use from the theoretical level, in chapter III, the article turns its gaze to two emergent and typical means of utilizingworks closely related with fair use in the digital age--distance education and digitallibraries. It is no doubt that both of them make excellent contributions to dissemination of culture, but we must properly apply fair use to them. Fair use can be applied to distance education only if distance education agencies and teachers must assume certain duties and be applied to digital libraries only if transmission of electronic document is restrained to a certain extent.The foothold of the theoretical analysis and the reality inspection should be to perfect the existing legal institutions. In chapter IV, the article makes four proposals on how to make the fair use system in our country well-developed. The first is to adjust the legislative mode, the second is to make the legal system complete, the third is to add the statutory permission mechanism and the last is to try the new pattern of charging for fair use.