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Everyday Copyright Violations
Schneier has pointed out a great law review article about the problems with copyright. The author takes a look at normal daily practices and how many commonplace actions actually result in what can be considered copyright violations. "By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John's activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing."
Link in the story is a blog, here is the pdf that the blog links to: http://www.turnergreen.com/publications/Tehranian_Infringement_Nation.pdf
As an earlier poster pointed out I found the caveman tattoo bit about destruction quite funny, was also shocked to hear that "Happy birthday to you" is still under copyright, according to wiki it will expire in 2030 in the United States.
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I'm guessing someone will raise the point of Fair Use, so I'll repost the comment I posted on Schneier's blog as to why that doesn't really help you any. Oh, and a bonus link to USC 17 (copyright law) so you can see that I'm not making this crap up. Mind you, IANAL, but you need one to make sense of that. Any layman can figure out where and how it does NOT make sense, though, which is why I encourage you all to read it.
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You guys realize that Fair Use is something you have to *prove in court* right? By the time you're proving that your use was fair, you're already on the hook for big money in legal fees.
And how many of the copyright rules do you know? Did you know that having a TV that's too large can be copyright infringement in some cases? You can rent console games that meet very specific requirements, but you can't rent PC software (I really have to wonder where the X-Box games fall, legally speaking, given that the X-Box is just a PC, but it doesn't seem like Microsoft cares to test it and they may still meet the statutory requirements).
Honestly, read USC 17 sometime. It's positively mind-boggling. We've got everything from international treaty created super-trademarks (the Olympics & Red Cross spring to mind), loads of crap meant to serve various lobbies, and so many screwball statutes that I don't understand at all.
Granted, IANAL, but I think that the average person would be surprised by just how many rules there are. And those are just the statutes!
God help you when you find out that, while "facts" aren't copyrighted, facts about a fictional work aren't really "facts" according to at least one court! That's right, the fact that Harry Potter attends Hogwarts may not be a "fact" per the law. So I might just have infringed upon Rowling's copyrights right there.
She won't sue, you say? Actually, she IS suing someone right now over that very issue because they want to publish an unauthorized encyclopedia...
Is it really Fair Use when there are so very many confusing rules you have to follow to maybe, hopefully be protected (with that assuming the courts decline to make a new precedent or extend existing law)?
Or to sum up this entire post, isn't it bad if we each need our own personal lawyer just to be able to *OBEY* the law?
Theoretically, a copyright exists the moment a document is created, which is to say that if I have a half-written story somehwere which someone takes and finishes, I still have copyright to the original story and they have violated my copyright without including the section I wrote via attribution a.k.a. without my express consent. Now, copyright law was a lovely idea when the world was traversable in months, only a small fraction of the population could read and write, and everything was committed to paper, but the dawn on fast travel, the Internet, and digital media makes it iffy, because it requires much more effort to establish that a work is in fact yours to begin with and then the possibility a work gets onto the Internet will cause so many copies to be created that anything short of a global corporation is going to have the resources to sue everyone for infringement. The gist of the article is simple -- the old way of handling copyright (and by extension, intellectual property) is ineffectual at best.
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Based on a cursory Westlaw search using the terms 'copyright' & 'fair use' & 'tattoo', this issue has not been litigated in the US. A personal tattoo does not fall into the listed categories of fair use such as criticism, teaching, scholarship, or research. See here.
Ordinarily, non-commercial uses that do not affect the value of the copyrighted work tend towards fair use. This limitation applies regardless of the medium of the purported infringement. In order to get some real closure to our tattoo debate, what we need is a porn star with a Mickey Mouse tattoo clearly visible in a video.
(warning: puns incoming) That would give us reproduction in a commercial context, and someone with deep pockets to sue.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Unfortunately for your hyperbole, you haven't the slightest clue what you are talking about. In addition, you were too lazy to read an extremely interesting article. I refer you to footnote 38:
See, e.g., Christopher A. Harkins, Tattoos and Copyright Infringement: Celebrities, Marketers, and Businesses Beware of the Ink, 10 LEWIS & CLARK L. REV. 313 (2006) (using the recent infringement suit involving NBA star Rasheed Wallace's tattoo as the starting point for analyzing the minefield of ink-related copyright issues).Obviously the point is not very heavily tested, but it sure sounds like there's some leeway for lawsuits there.
(Naturally I avoid quoting your post as I don't want to be guilty of infringing your copyright on it. Oh, hang on -- my quotation from n. 38 above might be defensible under the "fair use" defence in the US, but unfortunately there's no such thing as the fair use defence in my country, so I guess I'm an infringer after all. Dammit!)
While IANAL, I have taken business law, so I needed to learn some of this stuff:
Fair Use is an affirmative defense to an accusation of copyright infringement. I'm not certain, but I think an affirmative defense is more than simply an admission of guilt with an excuse. I think that an affirmative defense implies that, though the facts of the case may support the accuation ("I did make a copy of that copyrighted work"), you are asserting, as a matter of law, that you didn't violate the statute in question ("but my copy is allowed under the doctrine of fair use"). You are, in effect, claiming that no actual crime occurred, because you actions don't fall under the specific language of the statute (or are exempted by other specific language).
In any trial there are two broad groups of things at issue: issues of fact (what things actuall happened) and issues of law (how to interpret the things that happened). Fair Use is an issue of law, not of fact. When an accusation is made against you in a court of law, you may defend yourself in several ways: you can deny the facts of the case ("I never did the thing that I am accused of doing.", "I never made any copies of the copyrighted work.") and you may deny the illegality of your actions ("I did the deed, but it is allowed under the law for this reason.", "I did make a copy of the copyrighted work, but it is allowed under fair use for this reason."). You can even defend yourself on both the facts and the law ("I never did the deed, but If I had it wouldn't have been illegal under the law for this reason.").
just a ghost in the machine.