What is Fair Use in the Digital Age?

Hugh Pickens writes "General counsel for NBC Rick Cotton and Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law school, continue their debate about copyright issues and technology on Saul Hansell's blog at the New York Times discussing Fair Use of commercial music and video as the raw materials for new creations. Cotton says that content protection on the broadband internet is really not a debate about fair use The fact that users can 'take three or four movies and splice together their favorite action scenes and post them online does not mean that these uses are fair. There needs to be something more — something that truly injects some degree of original contribution from the maker other than just the assembly of unchanged copies of different copyrighted works.' Wu's position is that 'it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web.' This is a continuation of the previous discussion on copy protection."

Comments

I'm not confused but the headline is!

[garcia]

There is no difference in Fair Use rights in the "Digital Age". It's the same as it's always been. It's only because of the misinformation campaigns by the RIAA and MPAA that we have a society that's confused about the rights they have had for quite some time.

Unfortunately, the sheep are easily swayed over time (the frog/boiling water deal I suppose). I'm not fooled and hopefully they won't be able to fool intelligent judges either. They might buy over Congress but someone needs to put their foot down and stick up for us.

I'm tired of stories like this :(

"work that adds to the value of the original"

[Facetious]

And how would we measure that? Adding content != adding value. Conversely, a new blend of old content can change the contents "feel," message, and/or meaning. I would love to see the "value matrix of subjective content."

Re:Fair use is very simple

[loki_tiwaz]

I've never understood why it isn't simple - if you make money off it, it's piracy, unless you negotiate a distribution license. Everything else is fair use. This breaks down a little bit in the context of sites like youtube or showing them on a television show. Thinking it through, I think that such a form of distribution is actually advertising and the copyright holders should leave them alone because it's advertising that reaches fans directly, the people who they are marketing to, right?

My deal with the RIAA/MPAA

[AmiMoJo]

Here's the deal. You get to use publicly owned material like the English Language, classical music, out-of-copyright books and traditional stories (hello Disney), pictures of public places (including MY HOUSE damn it), regional accents etc. in return for some fair use rights and a limited (say 15 year max) copyright term. Sound fair?

Nothing that big media produces is entirely original. Apart from the fact that they use a public domain language (English) with slang and common metaphors not written by them, they of course are inspired by earlier work. Bands like Oasis wouldn't exist without The Beatles, yet they pay them no fees. The Matrix is just an updated version of Descart's "I think therefore I am" idea.

Either they give something back or they start paying.