Intellectual property cases involving copyrighted material in the United States increased by 48% in the year 2013 (“Caseload Statistics Summary”). In an age of creativity and emergent artists, patent and copyright law becomes increasingly significant. Fair use is an important doctrine in the United States that grants the limited use of copyrighted works to authors of creative material. Under fair use, an author wishing to use a certain work is not required to gain permission from the original creator of the work as long as he or she is using said work for specific purposes including but not limited to commentary, parody and research. In order to determine whether or not a work was used under the fair use doctrine, a four-factor test is included…show more content… These works range from the literary masterpieces of Shakespeare to the philosophy and science of Descartes and Darwin. While Mirsky does cite each quote he uses in endnotes, it is dubious whether or not his utilization of his chosen quotes is considered fair use. In order to determine if Mirsky’s article does constitute fair use, we will subject it to the four-step balancing…show more content… Is it to comment on, criticize or parody the original works or is it simply for research or academic purposes? Determining how the material taken from the original work has been transformed with creative expression and additional meaning is the prime factor in the determination of fair use. It seems fairly certain that in this article, Mirsky is ironically commenting on the use of plagiarism in modern times. With his piece, he is utilizing the chosen quotes and works in order provide commentary on and criticize a larger problem. He succeeds, as after reading a line or two of the chosen famous quotes, it becomes evident that he is writing in order to demonstrate the extensive use of plagiarism in everyday writing and publications. If Mirsky simply wrote an original article on his chosen topic and did not use renowned quotes, the strength and meaning of the article would not be as clear or overwhelming as it is with this collage of quotes. Therefore, “Copy That” does advance knowledge in some way by alerting readers to how prevalent plagiarism is. Mirsky quotes, “When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research” (Mizner). This is exactly what Mirsky is doing in his article; he is utilizing many sources and consolidating them in order to communicate his message. In addition, although he writes very few of the words in the article himself, it takes his creative mind and effort to find
