Quote:
Originally Posted by travfar
One, your basic statement that "Whether a given use constitutes fair use is decided by the courts, not by that law." is fundamentally wrong. The court exists to enforce the law, the law specifies whether something is legal or not. The court cannot "decide" something in contradiction of the law. It can strike down a law if it is in violation of another law. In this instance it is merely enforcing another law.
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Courts (or rather, judges) also
interpret the law, and those interpretations very often set legal precidents which other courts then follow. A court can certainly decide, for example, whether or not a particular activity constitutes "fair use".
A good example was the 1984 "Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.," case (464 U.S. 417), where Universal Studies tried to prohibit Sony from selling video recorders, claiming that they infringed copyright. Sony won, and the case set a number of important legal precidents, which still exist today: that manufacturers of recording devices cannot be held responsible for acts of copyright infringement committed with those devices, and that recording of TV shows for the purposes of time-shifting constitutes fair use.