Why We Need Bright Lines

By Joseph Storch. In Friday’s decision in Cambridge University Press v. Patton, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit followed decades of jurisprudence in casting aside bright line rules for determining whether faculty made fair use of copyrighted material. This is regrettable, as the celebrated 2012 district court opinion in the same case had opened up the possibility of teaching faculty how to properly make fair use of material using plain terms and easy-to-understand concepts, while the appeals court opinion returns us to the days of case-by-case holistic analysis and detailed exceptions, loopholes, and caveats. Read more...