 Copyright law gives creators, such as authors and artists, the exclusive right to copy, modify, distribute, perform, and display their creative works. Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement. Fair use lets you use someone's copyrighted work without permission, as long as you do it in a way that adds new meaning to the work. Each fair use case is its own fact-specific inquiry, in which courts are guided by the four factors of fair use. One, purpose and character of the use. Two, nature of the underlying work. Three, amount and substantiality taken. And four, the effect on the market. Fair use protects many different categories of uses, including parodies, critiques, educational uses, and socially beneficial mass digitization projects like Google Books. Parodies are works that imitate other works to make fun of, criticize, or comment on the original work. A famous example of a parody being protected by fair use is Two Live Crew's rendition of Pretty Woman, which poked fun of and ridiculed the original version by Roy Orbison. The Supreme Court held that Two Live Crew's parody was a fair use because it ridiculed the innocent nature and outdated tropes of the original song. Fair use also protects broader categories of criticism, such as comments, scholarship, and other forms of research. A documentary filmmaker may be able to use copyrighted clips to comment on the subject matter and educate the public. One notable example involves a documentary chronicling Muhammad Ali's life. The filmmaker used copyrighted clips of Ali's fight against George Foreman and Zaire, and the court found that the filmmaker was likely to succeed on the merits of the fair use defense because the documentary was a combination of comment, criticism, scholarship, and research. Fair use can also protect digital applications that use copyrighted works for a different purpose that transforms those works. In the Google Books case, Google digitized thousands of books to make them searchable. This was a fair use because it transformed the books from content into data, which facilitated research and made it easier for users to identify appropriate works. These examples are non-exhaustive, but they provide a glimpse into the broad spectrum of creative uses that fair use protects. If you want to learn more about fair use, there's several resources online that you can visit. On the Berkman Klein Center's Digital Literacy Resource Platform, you can check out our fair use infographic, podcast, and our guide for teachers.