Betamax Defense and Fair Use
1984 was a critical year in the shaping of copyright laws and creativity for the future. In that year, Sony Corporation produced a VCR, called the Betamax, on which you could record TV programs. The Betamax also had a fast forward button that could ultimately be used to skip the commercials during the program that was recorded. This feature was seen by the Motion Picture Association of America and many others as effectively allowing users to "steal" programming. Hollywood had a fit over the Betamax, and in 1984 Universal City Studios filed suit against Sony. The Supreme Court's ruling on the case would be one of the single most important decisions for the use of technology and creativity to date. Since the video recorder had many legitimate uses, the Supreme Court ruled that the Betamax did not infringe on copyrights, rather people did. This idea that the existence of legal, legitimate, uses in a piece of technology could outweigh the potential for consumers to find illegal uses would come to be known as the Betamax defense. If the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Universal Studios, things would be a lot different today. Computers would have been outlawed, as they probably have as much potential for illegal use as legal.
Fair Use
The idea of fair use has been another extremely important development in the furthering of possibilities for creativity and loosening the choke-hold that copyright has on it. A section addressing fair use of copyrighted materials has been added to U.S. copyright laws, and its creation was the result of many court-case decisions over the years. Fair use allows for certain non-infringing uses of copyrighted materials that were not originally addressed when the laws were first formed. This has been important for creativity and even more so for educational purposes. Fair use allows things such as short excerpts from works to be used for educational, non-commercial, purposes. Although the fair use guidelines are fairly ambiguous, they broaden the range of non-infringing uses of copyrighted works. This allows for collaboration and ideas to be built upon, as well as furthering learning opportunities. Without fair use, copyright owners would be able to sue for any use of their works that they wanted. Sure that would help pad their bank bank accounts, but what exactly is the purpose of creating something that can't be shared or used as a catalyst for other ideas? If art didn't give rise to new art, it probably wouldn't be all that exciting after a while. If ideas couldn't be shared and built upon, the gain of new knowledge would be slowed drastically. Fortunately, those aren't scenarios that will need to be dealt with.
To see the official fair use guidelines, check this out http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html