Courts are the only avenue for copywrite litigation—ensures clog
Brown 21 [Marissa Brown “NOT SO FAIR USE: THE SHOR AIR USE: THE SHORTCOMINGS OF CURREN COMINGS OF CURRENT COPYRIGHT LAW IN MUSIC SAMPLING “, https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1354&context=bjcfcl published 5-18-2021 accessed 6-11-2024]
Not only can federal litigation be costly, but it can also be lengthy given the backlog of cases in the federal court system. In 2019 alone, there were 376,762 filings in U.S. District Courts and 47,977 filings in the twelve regional Courts of Appeals. 70 Having the federal courts be the only arena for copyright infringement cases adds to this backlog and could potentially cause the parties in the case to have to wait long periods of time before their trial.
B. INCONSISTENT RULINGS
The lack of a bright-line-rule and the fact intensive nature of the test gives rise to inconsistency.71 Even though every court is using the same factors, the lack of clear rules and the dependence on fact-sensitive analyses leave ample room for different courts to have different interpretations on both how much weight should be given to each factor and the meaning of each factor. As no one district court ruling is binding on any other, cases with similar fact patterns can have inconsistent rulings across different federal courts, even within the same circuit. For example, a more than thirty second, unedited sample of a copyright protected work was considered fair use while a highly transformed snippet that was influenced by a copyright protected work was not.72