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Reviews have a distinct "character of use", one of the four cornerstones of fair use exceptions.

A review can be commercial, can cause significant harm to the market, can include substantial amount of the work, and yet the character of use can be significant enough to convince a judge that a exemption should be applied. Since judges historically has come to this conclusion there exist now legal precedence. With precedence we can make some general conclusions which tell us that reviews are in general exempted when using other peoples copyrighted work for the purpose of reviews.

This character of use is very different then if I convert a studio record of a song into mp3 and publish it on p2p sharing site. Judges has historically viewed the character of use in those situation as not being worth giving exemptions.



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