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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 3
  • Relationships: 5
  • Research debt items: 3

17 U.S.C. § 107

Summary

17 U.S.C. § 107 is the U.S. fair use statute, limiting copyright owners' exclusive rights for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.

Verified Facts

  • The statute is codified at 17 U.S.C. § 107.1
  • Fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research is not an infringement of copyright.1
  • Courts determine fair use by considering four non-exclusive factors: (1) purpose and character of the use, including commercial vs. nonprofit educational character; (2) nature of the copyrighted work; (3) amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the work as a whole; and (4) effect on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.1
  • The fact that a work is unpublished does not by itself bar a finding of fair use if the other factors support that finding.1
  • The EFF legal guide states that there are no hard-and-fast rules for fair use and that word-count or percentage guidelines are not the law.3

Legal analysis has not yet been drafted from primary case law. Future work should compare statutory text against GovInfo and add leading fair use decisions with court opinions as sources.

Relationships

  • STAT-USC-107 cites SRC-USC-17-107-LII.
  • STAT-USC-107 cites SRC-USC-17-107-GOVINFO.
  • STAT-USC-107 related_to TOPIC-FAIR-USE-VIDEO.
  • STAT-USC-107 related_to CASE-LENZ-V-UNIVERSAL.
  • STAT-USC-107 related_to CASE-GOOGLE-V-ORACLE.

Sources

  1. SRC-USC-17-107-LII: 17 U.S.C. § 107.
  2. SRC-USC-17-107-GOVINFO: 17 U.S.C. § 107 (GovInfo).
  3. SRC-EFF-BLOGGERS-IP: EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers — Intellectual Property.

Research Debt

  • Add leading video and music fair use cases with primary sources (for example Campbell v. Acuff-Rose).
  • Summarize statutory history from official legislative materials.
  • Draft legal analysis from primary case law rather than secondary guides.

Document metadata

  • Enactment date: 1976
  • Last verified: 2026-07-19

  1. SRC-USC-17-107-LII — 17 U.S.C. § 107. Primary authority. ↩↩↩↩

  2. SRC-USC-17-107-GOVINFO — 17 U.S.C. § 107 (GovInfo). Primary authority. ↩

  3. SRC-EFF-BLOGGERS-IP — EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers — Intellectual Property. Official educational guide; secondary source. ↩