Should the UK Move to a Fair-Use Copyright Exception?
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Abstract
In the wake of two major government reviews in the United Kingdom, this paper considers whether there might be advantages, particularly in terms of encouraging innovative creative work, in moving the UK much closer to a position allowing courts to accept a claim of fair use as a general defence to a claim of copyright infringement. Since an EU directive holds UK and European jurisprudence to a specific defence based on enumerated purposes, the arguments in the paper are potentially of more general application beyond UK shores. A comparison is made between the operation of enumerated purposes for fair dealing in the UK and the US approach to copyright exceptions based on fair use, which is spreading internationally. A case is made on the basis of the nature of transformative use of existing expressive work, and noting that encouraging innovative work is part of the EU jurisprudence that has increasing impacted UK courts in recent years, making it by no means impossible to argue for fair use in a UK context, or, indeed, in a wider context.