Page:The copyright act, 1911, annotated.djvu/41

Rh Existing law—Reasonable extracts may be taken for the purpose of criticism. The extracts must, however, betaken boná fide for the purpose of criticism, and not for the purpose of enhancing the value of the copyist's work by reproducing the plums from the original work.

The following is the definition of "fair use" given by Stephen, J., in the Digest of Copyright Law which he prepared for the Copyright Commission in 1878.

"The only use which an author can lawfully make of a prior copyright work on the same subject is—

In the case of directories, compilations of statistics and similar works which are the result of more or less mechanical labour, a subsequent compiler has no right to take the results of the labour and expense incurred by another for the purposes of a rival publication. The compiler of a directory cannot simply cut the slips from another copyright directory, and having verified them by a house-to-house canvass, insert in his own directory the corrected slips.