American Fair Use Doctrine And Its Implications To China

Fair use is an indispensable part of copyright law,which permits people's limited use of copyrighted materials without having to acquire permission from the copyright holders and paying them fees,to achieve the balance between authors,right holders and the public.Two types of regulations on fair use are used by different countries based on their fundamental realities.The United Kingdom encoded fair dealing into the Copyright Act 1911 and till now it still follows fair dealing.Germany tends to regard copyright as author's natural right,thus it prefers the closed list of copyright exceptions to protect author's rights.Different from fair dealing,American fair use can be applied to any purposes of use,in case that the use is deemed fair.Fair use provides some flexibility,which can make countries easily adapt to the rapidly developing technologies and take into account both author's interests and public use.Korea,Canada and Australia have imitated the regulations of American fair use,and tried to inject flexibility into their copyright laws.This paper adopts the methods of document analysis,case analysis and comparative analysis to study the characteristics of American fair use,and based on the comparison between fair use and fair dealing by introducing the regulations on fairness in many countries,the advantages of American fair use is highlighted,while there is no denying that American fair use also has its own defects.In addition,based on the analysis of the current legislation and practices of fair use in China,this paper points out the imperfection in China's regulations on fair use,and suggests that China's legislation should learn partly from American fair use according to the current conditions of China.Due to the trend of introducing flexibility to copyright legislation,it is recommended that China should add other new statutory limitations and extend some existing statutory limitations,as well as inject the flexibility to copyright legislation.For example,according to the economic and legislative conditions,the analysis of fairness factors can be included in China's copyright legislation,instead of directly transplanting the three-step test to China's copyright law.This paper is innovative in the research perspective,namely,it focuses on the core of American fair use and digs deep into its features,while the paper does not go into detail of the fair use in other countries and gives less explicit suggestions.