Supreme Court Case: Harper & Row V. The Nation

There also has unsuccessful case in issue of fair use exception, the Harper & Row v Nation Enterprises case, Gerald Ford, a former president wrote memoir contain decision which related to Richard Nixon and provide a license of publication to Harper & Row which agree to condition that the excerpts of the memoir have to be published in Time magazine. The Nation magazine printed several verbatim phrase directly from the book without permission of the author, Harper & Row or even the Time magazine. Hence Harper & Row sued The Nation for copyright infringement. The Nation claim that Ford’s opinion and reasons related to Nixon not only were a major interest of the public and Ford was also a public figure. Therefore, the publication of The Nation should be consider as fair use. The District Courts held that publication of The Nation cause damages to Harper & Row and did not considered as faire

The Courts applied the traditional four criteria to evaluate fair use defence and found that although the nature of copyrighted work was informative, however, the purpose of use was for commercial not for review or reporting news as usual. The portion of copyrighted work which has been using was a small amount. Nevertheless, the work of The Nation contain the heart of the copyrighted works which constitute substantial part of the original work and leads to the negative effect of the market for the value of the copyrighted material.

As mention before, these four factors of the US copyright law are harmonized with several factors in an issue of fair dealing which have been identified by the courts in the UK. In my point of view, comparing fair use criteria between the UK and US, in an aspect of musical works, US’s factors are suitable and more specific than the UK factors.

US copyright