"Anyone who claims you can answer fair use controversies by running through the four factors as though they were a checklist really doesn't understand fair use"

I agree, but the problem I see far more often is the people who claim something is "fair use" without considering any of those four criteria, for which the four-question analysis returns a clear "no" for all four questions. Or "unclear but trending no".

The internet at large defines "fair use" as "I want to be able to do that for free".

Yeah, maybe somewhere in the bowels of the megabytes of legal proceedings there's some fair use case that clearly failed all four criteria and was still found to be "fair use". This being 2026, I went ahead and asked an AI if it could turn up such a case, with the "high effort" on, and it came back with no. My prompt specified that I wasn't looking for the judge to rigidly specify "no", just express a belief that they were weak but then rule in their favor anyhow. Maybe an AI oriented towards legal searching could do better and if someone can come up with one, I'd be interested in seeing it.

But even if someone does come up with one, it is fairly clearly a curiosity and not something you should bet your future legal status or a business on.