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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."
Unfortunately for the author's hyperbole, tattoos of copyrighted art on one's person fall under fair use.
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Does anyone even understand copyright on fonts?
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Sorry. I had to.
Since we've all seen and we all know Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." quote, and Rand's "There's no way to rule innocent man..." quote, let's go for something a little closer to home in US jurisprudence.
Unfortunately, it wasn't an April Fool's joke.
Was there a court decision which has verified this?
That's a very good article. The example surprised me. I thought that one would need to be much more far-fetched than he was to get the total that he gets.
It even failed to mention some potential liabilities. When he "emails his family five photographs of the Utes football game he attended the previous Saturday," the point is the infringement of the copyright of his friend who took the pictures. He doesn't pile on the possibility that the images themselves contain copyrighted team logos, or that... this is so weird that I'm not sure I'm remembering it correctly, but I believe the owners of some buildings are now claiming that the appearance of the building itself is copyrighted and that photographing the buildings infringes... so the photographs might be infringing by showing the stadium itself.
What he does not mention is the spectre of selective enforcement. It is very convenient for authorities if everyone is a law-breaker, because then you always have a valid pretext for prosecuting/persecuting them.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Watching as US Copyright goes south is particularly painful for someone who grew in a communist country. I was old enough before '89 to take part in political discourse, which often took form of political jokes. It was a kind of very bitter humor, uninteligible for someone who didn't breathe this air of suspicion and fear. So this is a kind of nasty flashback for me, as it reminds me the joke/saying from those times: there is a law on everybody*. As soon as you stick your head too high, to far, put your nose where it doesn't belong, someone will find a law that will punish you severly. It's kind of bitter irony, that it is US, the mythical Land of the Free of my youth.
/. comments?
Robert
* pl. na kazdego jest paragraf
PS The nineties called and they want their "iso-8859-1 hardcoded webpages" back. Need I wait for "Web 5.0" to be able to use non-latin1 characters in
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Fair use is sort of equivalent to a plea of insanity. Both are affirmative defenses in that you must first admit that you did indeed commit the action that you were accused of in order to invoke it.
So most likely it wouldn't mean that you haven't violated copyright law, but instead that one isn't liable for doing so. But IANAL so I may have gotten that somewhat incorrect.
Affirmative defenses tend to be risky, in that if the jury decides that the defense isn't strong, then you've effectively pleaded guilty without the benefits of a plea bargain in place.
Tell that to Prince, who has issued a takedown for a photo of a fan's Prince tattoo.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I took a class once taught by my grad school mentor that dealt with copyright law. He used to teach the standard thing of "x number of years after the author's death." I spoke with him more recently and asked him about this and he said that he now just tells his students bluntly "Anything copyrighted after the mid-20's will likely never fall into the public domain." Even in cases where stuff HAS fallen into public domain for whatever reason (abandonment, dissolution of the owning company, etc.), it can easily be de facto reclaimed if there is any financial incentive to do so (as the legal maneuverings over "It's a Wonderful Life" illustrate).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A personal tattoo does not fall into the listed categories of fair use such as criticism, teaching, scholarship, or research.
Ah...but since the person in the example was a law professor couldn't he claim that the Captain Caveman tattoo was legal research because he wanted to see if he could get sued for having it and so therefore he couldn't be sued? Or would that much circular logic make a judge's head implode?
What do you expect really.
The entire idea that "I got here first, so I own it" is antiquated in the digital age. If someone can reproduce the steps you took to get there, someone will. The whole idea that the creator should continue to control their creation after it is released is just plain counter-productive. The separate issue of whether they should be compensated for their work is another matter entirely.
Then there's the fact that companies spend billions on marketing then try to sue if someone uses the image they intentionally made popular. How asinine is that!
What we need is a change to the law such that anyone may produce their own copies or derivatives once a work is made public BUT if they profit from a copy of someone else's creation, they must pay part (or all) of their revenue back to the copyright holder.
As it stands copyright law is based on an 18th Century world (or rather part of the world) and the unique conditions of that time and place. They don't belong here and now.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
How about the tattoo-artist who draws copyrighted pictures on other peoples' bodyparts - for money? I guess that doesn't count as fair use, does it?