| Summary: | Part of a special issue on the public domain. In developing fair use copyright legislation, Congress synthesized prior case law developments into four statutory factors. Judges, treatise writers, and other commentators offer a number of different explanations for how fair use cases actually get decided, apart from the four factors. Ultimately, in resolving fair use cases, courts tend first to make a judgment that the ultimate disposition is fair use or unfair use, and they then align the four factors to fit that result as best they can. Therefore, the four factors serve as convenient pegs on which to hang antecedent conclusions.
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