Fair use is a U.S. copyright doctrine that can permit limited use of protected material without permission when the purpose and impact fit specific legal factors. Courts typically look at why the material was used, what was taken, how much was copied, and whether the use harms the market for the original. It is not a blanket exemption, and its outcome is highly context dependent.
In cyber security, fair use matters when defenders copy code, screenshots, logs, or malware samples for analysis, reporting, or incident response. Security teams may rely on it to publish indicators of compromise, document vulnerabilities, or compare malicious code during reverse engineering. The same doctrine can also appear in disputes over scraping, search indexing, AI training, or reuse of news and threat-intel content. Because attackers and platforms can each claim different interpretations of reuse, fair use often sits at the boundary between technical investigation and legal risk management.