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Originally Posted by HarryT
I may certainly be wrong, but that's not my recollection of the US law. Perhaps someone else knows?
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I am slightly in error: "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" is one of the four factors considered by a court in order to determine whether a particular instance of copying constitutes Fair Use. Wikipedia has this to say about it:
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The third factor assesses the quantity or percentage of the original copyrighted work that has been imported into the new work. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, ex: a few sentences of a text for a book review, the more likely that the sample will be considered fair use. Yet see Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. for a case in which substantial copying—entire programs for private viewing—was upheld as fair use, at least when the copying is done for the purposes of time-shifting. Likewise, see Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, where the Ninth Circuit held that copying an entire photo to use as a thumbnail in online search results did not weigh against fair use, "if the secondary user only copies as much as is necessary for his or her intended use". Conversely, in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises,[19] the use of fewer than 400 words from President Ford's memoir by a political opinion magazine was interpreted as infringement because those few words represented "the heart of the book" and were, as such, substantial.
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So, the actual substance of what I said was correct: copying an entire work does not necessarily rule out "Fair Use"; it depends on the circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use