 Hi, my name is Fred von Lohmen and I'm a copyright lawyer. I happen to work for Google, but the views in this video are my own and not necessarily those of my employer. With that out of the way, let's talk about fair use. Fair use is crucial to our copyright system today more than ever before. Because copyright covers so much and lasts so long, fair use has more work to do today than ever before. Virtually everything written down or recorded or otherwise fixed in a tangible medium of expression, as we copyright lawyers put it, is automatically protected by copyright for at least 70 years. And because computers must make copies of things in order to function, copyright touches nearly everyone's daily life. Before computers, for example, you didn't need to make a copy of a book to read a book. But today, if you want to read a book on your phone, your device will have to make a copy, probably many copies, before you can read it. So it's not a surprise that copyright reaches so many parts of our lives today. And therefore it should be no surprise that fair use is so important as well. Now there are a lot of things that this video will not touch on. Things that I'm sure you'll hear about in other videos this week. Things like how fair use enables parody, satire, appropriation art, political commentary, how it enables things like remixes, mashups, how teachers rely on it every day, how documentarians use it in order to create their films, and how film reviewers themselves rely on fair use to take quotations from movies and increasingly take clips from movies as well. That's not what I'm going to talk about. What I want to talk about today is the way fair use enables so much technology that we take for granted and use every day. To take one example that's near and dear to my heart, search engines. You might not have thought about it before, but fair use is crucial to search engines. Whether you use Bing or Google or Yahoo or some other search engine, no search engine would exist without fair use. That's because in order to create a search engine, you first have to copy large numbers of websites. Ideally, you want to copy all the websites so that you can index them and thereby allow people to search for that and return answers to their queries. However, we're not just talking about web search when we're talking about search engines. Today, for example, we have search engines for things like images. I'm sure many of you have used Google Image Search, Yahoo Bing, any of a number of other image-based search engines. There's also search book search engines. Google's own book search product allows you to search the full text of millions of books that Google has scanned. These are all just multiple kinds of search engines that depend on making large numbers of copies in order to index the copies so that people can search them. One area that people may not think of is audio search. If you've ever shazammed a song using your phone or used Sound Hound or used Google Sound Search, all of these are examples of technologies that identify what's going on in the audio world around you. These depend on the same basic idea as web search engines. You have to first copy all of the things you intend to identify to create an index, so you'd have to take a copy of every song, a copy of television, in order to extract a fingerprint that you can then use to create an index to identify the next time someone hears it, the next time they sample it on their phone. There's also other kinds of technologies beyond search that depend on fair use. Times shifting and space shifting technologies are ones that many people use every day. To take one example, the VCR, back in 1984, the United States Supreme Court ruled that using a VCR to record broadcast television in order to watch at a later time was a fair use. Sure, you're making a copy. Sure, the programming on television is protected by copyright. But fair use left enough room for the VCR to allow time shifting for the American consumer. Of course, after the VCR came the Tivo and a whole bunch of digital video recorders and DVRs, most recently a court has ruled that the dish hopper DVR is a fair use when used to time shift in the same way that the Sony Betamax VCR was back in 1984. So whether you use a VCR or a Tivo or a dish hopper or any other DVR to time shift your television, you are relying on fair use. And that is what makes that technology legal to manufacture and to sell. In addition, there's all kinds of other time shifting and space shifting technologies that we take for granted every day. For example, if you load music from your CDs onto an iPod or onto your cell phone or onto your tablet, that's the kind of copying that most copyright lawyers would tell you is covered by fair use. However, maybe the most important thing here is not just the technologies that we've already seen and rely on every day, but actually all the technologies that haven't been invented yet. Technologies that, at least insofar as they are built around computers, will depend on making copies. So for example, there are fantastic new technologies being developed to do things like automated machine translation, the ability to translate documents from one language to another, or perhaps even translate in real time on the fly from one language into another in audio form. So for example, those technologies often depend on making large numbers of copies of various corpora, sorry, of texts in order to know which words correspond to which other words. Another area that's very interesting, you may have seen some of this in the news recently, there are a number of artificial intelligence researchers who are using old video games, Atari, Nintendo, Sega, old video games that the artificial intelligence is used to train. They've basically been teaching these computers to play the video games that we all enjoyed in the 70s and 80s. That's another great example of the kind of research that I believe would be covered by fair use. As my friend Corey Doctorow likes to tell people, the value of all the technologies that have been invented so far is less than the value of the technologies that haven't been invented yet. So we should keep in mind fair use, the benefits of fair use when it comes to technology, those benefits are still largely ahead of us. Fair use has a lot of work to do in enabling a whole bunch of research and a whole bunch of innovation that I think will enrich all of our lives. So the next time you use a search engine or you shazam a song or you watch a TV show recorded by your DVR, I hope you'll give a thought to fair use. After all, it's Fair Use Week. Thanks very much.