Copyright

The first Fair Use factor is the purpose and character of the use.

What weighs in favor of Fair Use are things like:

• Purpose. Purposes include: education, scholarship, research, and news reporting, as well as, criticism and commentary more generally
• Is the new work transformative? A transformative use is one that alters the original work “with new expression, meaning, or message …”
  • Parody is one of the most clearly identified transformative uses, but any use of a source work that criticizes or comments on the source may be transformative in similar ways. Legal analysis about this kind of transformative use often engages with free speech issues, and unusual artistic techniques.
  • Courts have also sometimes found copies made as part of the production of new technologies to be transformative uses. One very concrete example has to do with image search engines: search companies make copies of images to make them searchable, and show those copies to people as part of the search results. Courts found that small thumbnail images were a transformative use because the copies were being made for the transformative purpose of search indexing, rather than simple viewing.

So, what weighs against Fair Use are things like:

• Purposes that are for profit and commercial gains
• Uses/Works that are not transformative
   

The second Fair Use factor is nature of the copyrighted work.

What weighs in favor of Fair Use are thing like:

• Is it Published -  a work is considered published when the author makes it available to public on an unrestricted basis
• Is it Factual

What weigh against Fair Use are things like:

• Is it Unpublished
• Is it Highly creative and not very factual as in academic/scholarly/nonfiction works

The third Fair Use factor is the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

What weighs in favor of Fair Use are thing like:

• They made a copy of a small portion of the work
• The quality of the use was not the “heart” of the work

What weigh against Fair Use are things like:

• They made an entire copy of the work or a very large portion of the work (i.e., article/book etc.)
• The quality of the use was substantial or central or the “heart” of the original work

The fourth Fair Use factor is the effect of use upon the potential market for or value of copyrighted work.

What weighs in favor of Fair Use are thing like:

• The use of the copyright protected work would not replace the market for the original work

What weigh against Fair Use are things like:

• The use of the copyright protected work would replace the market for the original work