Fair use was created as astatutory guideline for effectuating the balance required to enable constitutionalgoals in the intellectual property clause, including support of education, a publicdomain, and free speech

This distinctive feature of the U.S. approach to copyright pro-tection correlates directly with the need for access to information as a basis for sup-porting democratic dialogue

In the workplace, they often develop documents that lead or guidethrough instruction and documentation; they produce structures such as reportforms for medical, insurance, and governmental treatment of the public that im-pact the way we interpret information that could affect our quality of life; and, asresearchers, they develop work that analyzes and critiques the impact of any num-ber of forms of communication,

We analyzesocietally affected communications and critique their sources, effects, and potentialmeanings for our students, for workplace technical communicators, or for society atlarge.

So, as an enabler of speech, the First Amendment supports access to informa-tion; a general, content-neutral restriction on access could be less stringently inhib-ited. But where content-based speech is concerned, the First Amendment is strictlyenforced; attempts to restrict content-based speech are strictly scrutinized

Thus, on the one hand, the copyright’s structurefunctions as a general restriction on publishing and disseminating another’sworks⎯a content-neutral restriction. On the other hand, quoting another’s work asa basis for criticism, or outright copying of another’s work as a means for parody(by its nature, a content-based commentary), is allowable as a means to supportspeech as a basis of democratic interaction

Constitution’s intellectual property provision clearly statesthat a copyright term must be limited

The Framers of theConstitution created a structure in the intellectual property provision that prioritizesthe advancement of learning and knowledge creation over its secondary, supportivepurpose: to benefit the author. To provide a benefit to the author merely creates anincentive for authors to expend energy to create new work. Note that U.S. copyrightdiffers greatly from that of moral rights, which is the adopted structure in Europeanlaw, based on the concept that creators have an absolute right to benefit from theirwork and that their right comes from a special moral requirement.

Technical communicators will also have an interest in understandingthe capacity for legal use of others’ materials in their processes of developingworkplace communications