Description

In 2019, Professor Jane Ginsburg delivered the Distinguished Visitor in Intellectual Property Lecture at NUS. Titled “Fair Use in the US: Transformed, Deformed, Reformed?”, the lecture explored US caselaw applying the statutory fair use exception, highlighting its excesses and apparent rebalancing.

Three and half years (and a pandemic) later, while appellate courts have reined in some of the more extreme applications of “transformative use”, the Supreme Court has rendered a decision in one fair use case (Google v. Oracle) and has heard arguments in another (Andy Warhol Foundation v Goldsmith). Together, these controversies prompt inquiry into the prospects for further judicial reforming, or deforming, of US fair use and copyright law. That inquiry extends to the fair use doctrine’s potential to accommodate massive inputs of copyrighted works into databases to enable “machine learning” by artificial intelligence systems.