Fair Use In The Digital Age: Adapting Traditional Copyright Exceptions For Emerging Technologies
- IJLLR Journal
- Jun 5
- 2 min read
Manvi Nigam, Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur
ABSTRACT
The digital revolution has greatly disoriented conventional paradigms of copyright law, presenting new challenges to the doctrine of fair use. In this research, it is explored how new technologies specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, and algorithmic content moderation have changed the interpretation, application, and enforcement of fair use in the 21st century. With AI systems learning from large datasets of copyrighted content, blockchain-based smart contracts facilitating automated licensing, and sites such as YouTube applying algorithmic filters for enforcing content, fair use has become an increasingly contested and uncertain legal landscape. This research critically examines the extent to which current legal structures are adaptive enough to accommodate these changes and examines legal and policy suggestions for recalibrating copyright protection in the face of changing technological realities.
Utilizing a doctrinal and comparative approach, the study examines seminal judicial precedents such as Authors Guild v. Google, Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, and Andersen v. Stability AI, and recent legislative activity such as the EU's DSM Directive and the U.S. DMCA. It recognizes systemic barriers like overreliance on automated enforcement mechanisms, the law's uncertainty about AI-generated content, blockchain's rigidity in assessing contextual fair use claims, and economic incentives that bias platform liability towards rightsholders. These issues have a chilling effect on creativity, disproportionately hurting educators, critics, and remix artists whose work builds upon transformative and public interest-based use.
The study concludes by suggesting a multi-faceted reform agenda that involves optimizing automated enforcement mechanisms, integrating fair use exceptions in blockchain and smart contract architecture, setting international standards for training AI and attribution of content, and strengthening user rights through legal presumptions as well as effective dispute resolution mechanisms. Finally, the study contends that protecting fair use in the digital age is necessary not only as a copyright exception but as a building block of innovation, free expression, and public access to information. Accordingly, it recommends a legal system that is both technologically adaptive and normatively dedicated to the values in which copyright law is rooted.
