From last week's decision by Fifth Circuit Judge Gregg Costa (joined by Judges Carolyn Dineen King and Don Willett) in Bell v. Eagle Mountain Saginaw Indep. School Dist.:
The softball team and flag corps at a public high school outside Fort Worth used their Twitter accounts to post a motivational passage [230 words, or one page from a 72-page book -EV] from sports psychologist Keith Bell's book, Winning Isn't Normal.
We do not know if the tweets motivated the students to perform at a higher level. We do know that the tweets resulted in Bell's suing the school district for copyright infringement. We must decide if the tweets were a fair use of the copyright that bars this suit.
Apparently the author, Dr. Keith Bell, had filed "over 25 copyright lawsuits" "[b]etween 2006 and 2017" over "unauthorized uses of [this] passage," mostly against "public schools or nonprofits, which published the WIN Passage on social media." But this time he lost:
