Extending database decisions from books to broadcasts, a decision by Southern District judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in Fox News v. TVEyes1 recently allowed a searchable database to incorporate copyrighted works in their entirety and provide users with excerpts as a fair use. The defendant, TVEyes, gives subscribers, among other features, online access to search tools and program clips from round-the-clock monitoring of hundreds of television and radio sources, including Fox News, without asking permission from owners of copyright. In approving these key features, the court’s decision follows the trail blazed by Authors Guild v. Hathi Trust2 and Authors Guild v. Google3 which held that electronic libraries of books created to allow users to search for keywords or terms were protected by fair use.
In each of these cases, courts were unmoved by the plaintiffs’ protests that they lost income as well as control over their copyrighted works. Rather, each court concluded that the benefits afforded to researchers in particular and society in general by online access to vast amounts of searchable data simply outweighed the interests of copyright owners, consistent with the fundamental purpose of copyright law and of the fair use exception to owners’ rights. Nevertheless, the limits placed by the defendants themselves or by the courts on the scope of permitted uses are as important as the courts’ embrace of fair use.
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