THE FAIR USE DOCTRINE AS A LIMITATION TO COPYRIGHT AND A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE THREE-STEP TEST IN THE COPYRIGHT SYSTEMS OF BRAZIL AND THE U.S.

Shortly after the Brazilian 1998 Copyright Law was enacted, calls for its reform arose due to the inadequacy of its provisions to adapt to technology changes and provide an adequate balance between grants of rights and reservations to those right in copyright law. The lack of limitations on private use unreasonably compromised the necessary balance for development and growth. Discussions about the adequacy of the closed-list model for limitations and exceptions also arose, providing an opportunity to consider the implementation of a system of copyright imitations and exceptions based on an open-ended list or the fair use doctrine. This dissertation analyzes copyright and the U.S. fair use doctrine from the standpoint of copyright's objectives and the theories on which the doctrine is based on, especially the reasonableness theory, and its compliance with the Three-Step Test included in the three major international agreements related to intellectual property and copyright law: the Berne Convention, the TRIPs Agreement, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. This study concludes that the fair use doctrine likely complies with the Three-Step Test and copyright's objectives and analyzes the current situation of copyrights in Brazil, specifically its unbalanced limitations/exception system, and proposes that there are grounds for implementing the fair use doctrine.