Overturning the AMST decision would require significantly weakening that understanding of fair use.

Corynne McSherry, “Fair Use Continued to Bear the Weight of Protecting Speech and Innovation: 2018 in Review,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 01-01-2019, https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2018/12/fair-use-continued-bear-weight-protecting-speech-and-innovation-2018-review

Fair use provides breathing space in copyright law, making sure that control of the right to copy and distribute doesn’t become control of the right to create and innovate. New technologies and services depend on the creation of multiple copies as a matter of course. At the same time, copyright terms cover works many decades old and copyrighted software appears in more and more devices. Taken together, these developments mean the potential reach of copyright may extend ever further. Fair use makes sure that the rights of the public expand at the same time.

Unfortunately, the courts did not always let fair use play that role in 2018.

On the plus side, the long-running litigation over the online publication of building codes and other standards that governments have adopted as binding law offered a prime example of fair use’s importance. As part of its mission of creating a comprehensive, fully accessible database of the law, Public Resource.org posts those binding standards on its website. Six industry groups, known as standards development organizations, accused PRO of copyright and trademark infringement for posting those standards online. In effect, they claimed the right to decide who can copy, share, and speak the law. In 2017, a federal district court ruled in favor of the standards organizations, and ordered PRO not to post the standards.

In July 2018, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed that decision, ruling that the district court did not properly consider copyright’s fair use doctrine. It rejected the injunction and sent the case back to district court for further consideration of the fair use factors at play. “[I]n many cases,” wrote the court, “it may be fair use for PRO to reproduce part or all of a technical standard in order to inform the public about the law.”

This is an important ruling for the common-sense rights of all people. As Judge Katsas, the demands of the industry groups for exclusive control of the law "cannot be right: access to the law cannot be conditioned on the consent of a private party." Based on today’s unanimous ruling, EFF is confident we can demonstrate that Public Resource's posting of these standards is protected fair use. The law belongs to all of us. We all have a right to read, understand and share it.