RIAA President Decries Fair Use

triskaidekaphile writes, "Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, has an editorial on CNet responding to the Consumer Electronics Association's support of the Digital Freedom campaign for fair use. Sherman proclaims, 'The fair use doctrine is in danger of losing its meaning and value.' Like a true spinner, he indicates that fair use is indeed important, then states 'Let's be clear. The CEA's primary concern is not consumers, but technology companies — often large, multinational corporations which, like us, strive to make a profit... But to seize the mantra of "consumer rights" to advance that business interest is simply disingenuous.' Slashdotters, trollers, and pollsters one and all, what say you? Disingenuous or dissembling?"

Comments

Re:I think he has a point

[plover]

[ Warning: I am not a lawyer. That should be obvious after the first paragraph. ]

I'm not sure that his use of "fair use" is that far off. For example, "fair use" means you can quote a few words from a textbook, but cannot repeat the whole book. "Fair use" also means you can play a few seconds of a song, or a few seconds of a movie without permission or penalty.

Fair use does not mean they have to make it easy for you to make a copy of those few seconds.

The real dissembling comes from him saying nothing about the doctrine of "first sale." That's the one that gives you the right to do whatever you want with a product once you've purchased it. For example, if you purchase a Spalding baseball the Spalding company cannot limit you to catching it only with a genuine Spalding glove. They can advertise the balls as "best caught with a Genuine Spalding Glove", they can print "WARNING: catch this ball only with a Genuine Spalding Glove or hand damage may result", and they can even print "Never sell your glove to anyone else" on your glove. But what they print on it has no legal bearing on what you are legally permitted to do with it.

There are exceptions for certain materials, such as pesticides and herbicides, that prevent you from using them in a manner harmful to the environment. But unless a Brittany Spears disc is capable of producing an ecological disaster, I doubt strongly that they apply.

Re:Fair Use vs. Limited Times

[turly]

This is because most works today are assigned to corporations. And corporations are in essence immortal persons, with no notion of "personal" responsibility. So obviously the corporation wants the Gravy Train to keep rolling for as long as possible. Watch the Corporate machine bribe congress in return for more than 95 years before the next Mickey Mouse Copyright Expiry in 2019.

(The last Mickey Mouse Copyright Expiry was to have been in 2003, but after intense lobbying, Congress passed The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998 -- though a fat lot of good it did Sonny. The fact that Disney donated some $6.3 million of campaign cash that same year is purely a coincidence.)

Yeats had it right:

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer

Re:yer mistaken

[aardvarkjoe]

Of course, rodentia is wrong. Try reading the relevant section of the US Code before you take his advice and start photocopying all of the textbooks in the library willy-nilly. The law explicitly states that all of the four factors enumerated there will be considered when determining if something is fair use, and those factors include the type of use (educational or commercial, for instance), the amount of material copied, and the effect on the market.

Re:He did lie....

[zcat_NZ]

"For me, fair use is being able to backup my cds onto my harddrive and encode them in any format I please for my mp3 player."

You're confused;

    Fair use is an exemption that lets you make and distribute copies (for money or not) which would normally be prohibited by copyright. Thus, things like reviews and parody.

    Things like backups and media shifting which doesn't involve making copies for other people should never have been the subject of copyright in the first place. They're just "use". Reasonable, ordinary, non-infringing "use" of something you already paid for.

    I shouldn't need permission to "copy" a CD onto my mp3 player or recode it in different format, the same way I shouldn't need permission to put it in a regular CD player and have all the bits 'copied' from bumps on the disk to digital signals, to an analog representation of the music.

    Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes, this isn't about fair use. This is an attack on just plain "use" and if you let them get away with it this time, the next move will be a fee every time you play the disk.