How does copyright protect the rights of creators, and how can fair use and fair practice be interpreted?

Copyright is a legal device that protects the rights of creators. Copyright law requires that you follow “fair use” and “fair practice” when citing someone else’s work, and violations can result in legal consequences.

 

Authors have a right to their work, which is called copyright. Copyright is a right granted to the author to protect works that are creative expressions of human thought or emotion. Copyright law requires permission from the copyright holder to use their work, and makes it illegal to do so without that permission. This gives authors the ability to prevent unauthorized use or alteration of their work and allows them to exercise control over their creations.
In addition, copyright also plays an important role in protecting the economic interests of creators. Creators are able to profit from their work, which is an incentive for them to continue to create. If copyright is not properly protected, creators are not rewarded for their efforts and creativity, which can be a major obstacle to the development of culture and art.
The Copyright Act also addresses infringement of intellectual property rights by stipulating that “published works may be quoted for news reporting, criticism, teaching, scholarship, and research, provided that such quotation is justified and consistent with fair practice.” This allows for limited use for specific purposes. This reflects the spirit of copyright law, which seeks to balance the public interest and individual rights by allowing limited uses for specific purposes. The idea is that when you quote someone else’s work, you must do so within reason and in a manner consistent with fair practice. The problem lies in the interpretation of “fair use” or “fair practice”.
First, legitimate scope can be interpreted as the necessity of citing other works in one’s own work, and a kind of master-servant relationship must be established between the content of one’s own work and the cited part. In other words, citation is only legitimate when one’s own work is the dominant part, and when one cites a part of another work as a subordinate part for the purpose of further emphasizing the subject matter or proving the validity of an argument.
What constitutes fair use depends on the intent and value of the quoted material. The social and cultural context determines whether the purpose of the citation is legitimate and should be interpreted in a way that promotes the public interest. In particular, citation is considered fair practice if it enhances the value of a new work or contributes to social discussion. For example, citation of a work as a source for a report, or for the purpose of commenting on or substantiating one’s own or another’s theories or arguments, is considered fair practice. Such citations should be done in a way that creates new value and respects the creator’s originality, not merely reproduces or imitates it.
The original purpose of allowing fair use under copyright law was to contribute to the advancement of culture by making works of scholarly and artistic value as readily available as possible to future authors and readers. This plays an important role in fostering a cultural ecosystem that allows creators to share their work and allows new works to build on and develop from existing works. However, no matter how legitimate a citation may be, it is not only legal, but also moral to fulfill the attribution obligation as strictly as possible. If you fail to do so, you’re not citing, you’re stealing, and you’re committing copyright infringement. Therefore, it’s common sense to use quotation marks or paragraph breaks to distinguish the quoted portion of someone else’s work from the main text by using a different typeface. Such attribution respects the rights of the creator, allows for fair evaluation of the work cited, and gives the reader the opportunity to know exactly where the quoted material came from.