When is news reporting fair use under copyright law?

[Commentary] A recent fair use case, Swatch Group Management Services Ltd v. Bloomberg, (2d Cir. 2014) might shed some interesting light on how news reporting plays into the fair use analysis.

In that case, the court found that defendant was protected by fair use when it distributed an audio recording of a company’s earnings call. A defendant may in some circumstances provide transformative material along with the faithful reproduction of an original work. But the absence of that transformative material will not disqualify a defendant from showing fair use.

This case shows that the news reporting aspect of fair use can be conceptually separated from transformative use.