CONFU‐sed: security, safe harbors, and fair‐use guidelines

Copyright law is multifaceted, but in general, it protects physical manifestations of creative effort. These manifestations may include works of art, books, computer software, paintings, photographs, sound and video recordings, websites, and a nearly infinite variety of other types of works. Copyright protection is broad and exclusive, and could prevent important social activities, such as parody, news reporting, and educational uses, if the law were not tempered by limitations on these exclusive rights. An important limitation is fair use. This limitation arose historically from common‐law decisions, and it is now codified in the Copyright Act of 1976. A fair‐use analysis consists of applying four statutorily described factors to the specific use of copyrighted materials and then weighing the results of this application. But some users of copyrighted works suggest that fair‐use law is too ambiguous and difficult to apply. As a result, various representatives of users and owners have attempted historically to craft guidelines more precisely delineating fair use for defined purposes. The Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) represents one such recent effort to develop guidelines for digital works. It is modeled on earlier efforts associated with the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976. CONFU ultimately proposed three sets of fair‐use guidelines, covering digital images, multimedia, and synchronous distance learning. The CONFU guidelines were released to copyright users, owners, and the world in 1997.