The doctrine posits that the law will disregard copying where the copied material is too trivial to qualify as an infringement. Under the theory, borrowing one chord from a song may be found to be too insubstantial to qualify as infringing.
To use de minimis as a defence, the size of such use must be miniscule, and no significant harm should have been caused to the copyright owner by such miniscule use of the copyright work.
Is the de minimis doctrine a defense to infringement?
The Ninth Circuit noted that both it and several sister Circuits (the First, Third, Fourth and Eleventh) have held that the de minimis doctrine is not a defense to infringement “but rather as an answer to the question of whether the infringing work and the copyrighted work are substantially similar so as to make the copying actionable.” .
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The Amount and Substantiality of The Portion Taken
The less you take, the more likely that your copying will be excused as a fair use.
However, even if you take a small portion of a work, your copying will not be a fair use if the portion taken is the “heart” of the work.
In other words, you are more likely to run into problems if you take the most memorable aspect of a work.
For example, it would .
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The Effect of The Use Upon The Potential Market
Another important fair use factor is whether your use deprives the copyright owner of income or undermines a new or potential market for the copyrighted work. Depriving a copyright owner of income is very likely to trigger a lawsuit.
This is true even if you are not competing directly with the original work.
For example, in one case an artist used .
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The Nature of The Copyrighted Work
Because the dissemination of facts or information benefits the public, you have more leeway to copy from factual works such as biographies than you do from fictional works such as plays or novels.
In addition, you will have a stronger case of fair use if you copy the material from a published work than an unpublished work.
The scope of fair use is .
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The Transformative Factor: The Purpose and Character of Your Use
In a 1994 case, the Supreme Court emphasized this first factor as being an important indicator of fair use.
At issue is whether the material has been used to help create something new or merely copied verbatim into another work.
When taking portions of copyrighted work, ask yourself the following questions:.
1) Has the material you have taken from t.
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What does de minimis mean in a copyright case?
In essence, the Ninth Circuit explained that de minimis goes to the amount of copying of a copyrighted work as opposed to any de minimis use or display of any such a work.
In the Bell case, a former attorney, Richard Bell, took a picture of the Indianapolis skyline in 2000.
Mr.
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What happens if a copyright is too small?
In some cases, the amount of material copied is so small (or “de minimis”) that the court permits it without even conducting a fair use analysis.
For example, in the motion picture Seven, several copyrighted photographs appeared in the film, prompting the copyright owner of the photographs to sue the producer of the movie.
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What is de minimis law?
The principle of De Minimis is a common law principle that has been derived from the Latin term ‘ De Minimis Non Curat Lex ’, which means that the law does not care for, or take notice of, very small or trifling matters .
This principle is not statutorily recognized by most countries in the world.
