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Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States
Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States
	Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 17, 1974; Decided February 25, 1975
Full case name	Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States
Citations	420 U.S. 376 (more)
Case history
Prior	487 F.2d 1345 (Ct. Cl. 1973)
Holding
	Court of Claims held that it was a fair use for libraries to photocopy articles for use by patrons engaged in scientific research. The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Supreme Court.
Court membership
	Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William O. Douglas · William J. Brennan Jr.; Potter Stewart · Byron White; Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun; Lewis F. Powell Jr. · William Rehnquist
Case opinion
	Per curiam
	Blackmun took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States, 487 F.2d 1345 (Ct. Cl. 1973), was an important intellectual property decision by the federal Court of Claims, later affirmed by a per curiam opinion from an evenly divided United States Supreme Court, with only eight justices voting (Harry Blackmun took no part in the decision of this case). The decision held that it was a fair use for libraries to photocopy articles for use by patrons engaged in scientific research.

This decision, written by Judge Oscar Davis, has been cited as part of the trend in which the courts will take a cautious approach to intellectual property issues raised by the advent of new technology. Rather than enforce the rights of the author articles by placing a prohibition on such copying, the Court in this case held that this was not prohibited by the law as written, leaving it to the United States Congress to address the issue through legislation.

In particular, according to David L. Lange (No Law), the case was a turning point for the doctrine of fair use: while for many decades the standards applied by courts to enforce copyright (or not) had been "arcana", the 1976 Copyright Act codified some fundamental criteria.