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Expanding Fair Use To Reform Copyright Law
Hugh Pickens writes "Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, presented a six-step program for reforming outdated US copyright laws in a speech at the New Media conference at Boston University. Sohn expressed no patience with the 'disconnect between the law and the technology' of media production and distribution. He puts Fair Use at the top of the list for changes that will help return balance to copyright laws that have limited innovation, scholarship, creativity, and free speech. In addition to the four-part legal test for fair use currently on the books, Sohn recommends that Congress add incidental, transformative, and non-commercial personal uses to the list of fair uses enumerated in copyright law, and in addition expressly provide that making a digital copy for the purpose of indexing searches is not an infringement. Beyond Fair Use reform, Sohn advocates punishing copyright holders who 'knowingly or recklessly' send out false takedown notices, protecting the manufacturer of a technology from liability for the infringing activity of others if the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, promoting fair and accessible licensing of copyrighted works, limiting damages for the use of orphan works, and requiring copyright holders to provide notice of any limitations on users' ability to make fair or lawful uses of their products."
I've never put a copyright on my works
Just to be clear, according to the Berne convention, the minute you create a work, it's copyrighted. Period. End of story. Registering that copyright simply makes it easier to enforce, if it ever came to that.
What you *should* be doing is placing your works under the Artistic License or something similar. That will ensure that those who might wish to use your works will be able to do so without fear that you'll come along later and hand them a cease and desist ('course, if you made public statements that you won't do such a thing, that changes things, but it's still advisable to just use an open license and be done with it).