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RIAA's Elementary School Copyright Curriculum
selven writes "In a blatant campaign devoid of any subtlety, the RIAA is fighting for the hearts and minds of our children with its Music Rules, a collection of education materials on how to respect copyright. The curriculum includes vocabulary such as 'counterfeit recordings, DMCA notice, "Grokster" ruling, legal downloading, online piracy, peer-to-peer file sharing, pirate recordings, songlifting, and US copyright law.' There is no mention whatsoever of fair use. Compounding the bias, it includes insights such as that taking music without paying for it is 'songlifting,' and that making copies for personal use and then playing them while your friends come over is illegal. On the bright side, it includes math showing that the total damages from copyright infringement by children in the US amount to a measly $7.8 million."
Surely the riaa can take a lesson from the war on drugs and get the children to turn in their parents and friends for dmca violations!
I mean c'mon wouldn't it be worth it to any kid to receive a free cd (with rootkit) for sending their parents, friends, neighbors and relatives to the slammer?
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I mean, I'll play devil's advocate for a just a second: It didn't stop them from smoking, so why the hell do you think it'll stop them from doing a far easier to do "crime"?!
We were taught to share. Guess those chickens came home to roost eh?
If you're actually doing some commentary on the pieces of the songs that you're using, then yes. And no, an episode of Family Guy is not a small piece - each episode is a standalone work.
Yeah well, I said that to illustrate a point in what is a complete work? Did you know that a single song can be recorded over hundreds of hours spent in a studio? Is each snippet of a track recorded a "complete work"? What about the post recording processing that goes on? You're using that too, you know.
... and there you are at +5 informative. Great, keep teaching kids that.
I'm just trying to get you to think about the ways in which this whole fair use thing becomes ambiguous but apparently you can say what you feel like saying without quoting or citing one legal document or precedent
Go ahead and tell us what fair use is, I'm not pretending to be a lawyer but you're doing a fine job.
As for my above post being moderated troll?! So much for discourse and discussion on nailing down the definition of "fair use." I cite Capitol Records chasing after the Grey Album and I'm the troll.
Why do I even waste my time putting together posts? I am so sick and tired of this site.
My work here is dung.
So given the above information, would you please outline how you would explain this to children?
Step 1: Teach them critical thinking, instead of doctrine.
Step 2: There is no step 2.
Children should learn to think. With regard to controversial topics like copyright law or health care legislation, they should be encouraged to seek broad resources and to judge for themselves. They should never, under any circumstances, be indoctrinated into any belief. Not even beliefs about fair use, of which I am a rabid supporter.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Children are best at spotting when the emperor is naked.
I see what you're saying, but you're wrong. Children are horrible at spotting that.
Look at drug education, which is taught in a similarly shrill tone. Almost all children come out of that with an absolute hatred of any drugs. It's not until later, when exposed to the actual effects that some of them will realize that most of what was taught was bunk. Many will have the extremely negative reaction that they were taught for the rest of their lives, regardless of any evidence they receive to the contrary. And even those that do figure out that it was mostly hysteria that they were taught generally fling in the other direction, rebelling against any authority and expecting everything they say to be a lie.
Teaching unbalanced and hysterical lessons to young children, who do not have BS filters in place, is as far as I've seen, universally harmful. I can think of no situation where a reasoned explanation of the facts, and clearly marked explanation of theories, would not be better than the above.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Sharing? that's bad, Stop sharing with billy.
and children, you do know that you kill kittens when you share? Also you are being very bad if you sing a song you heard on the radio without paying for the right to do so?
yes billy, your mother is a criminal for singing "happy birthday" to you yesterday. She is evil and should be put away.
you know kids, it's up to you to watch your parents and report any suspicious or bad behavior.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
UK Gov't Health tells kids to masturbate;Parents are angry. But when you have a monopoly, customer opinions don't matter
Your sig and your post both present the same essential argument, and both suffer from the logical fallacy. I seriously doubt that the Uk government is telling kids to masturbate. I full believe and wouldn't even be surprised to hear that the UK government is telling kids something along the lines of "Current psychological research shows that masturbation is natural and/or healthy". The first is giving advice, the second merely stating a fact. Moreover the second is stating a TRUE fact. Whether or not you believe that masturbation is natural and/or healthy, the vast majority of current research shows that it is. Your moral judgment on the act itself cannot stand in the way of a simple statement on the current state of research *about* the act. You are perfectly free, at home, to tell your children that masturbation is a sin, and that they should not do it. The schools can, and should, present data about what the most current science on the matter says. Schools should not be in the business of teaching morals, but they are in the business of presenting scientific data to students.
The same fallacy applies to your post about what RIAA is doing. While what the RIAA curriculum is teaching might be counter to your moral beliefs (i.e. you may believe that all information should be free and copyright laws are an abomination), unless it is factually inaccurate it doesn't matter. Schools are again not in the business of presenting moral arguments, they are in the business of presenting facts. In this case legal facts. If the facts are wrong (and in this case is seem that they are, if not wrong, certainly biased) then we should object. If the facts are right, and the curriculum does not stray into making moral declarations, then the fact that we'd like those facts to be different doesn't change anything. Objecting based on the idea that we'd rather our children didn't hear these facts is silly.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Because it's not well defined. Fair use is, in my opinion, an abomination in that it's a "law" that's not defined in anyway.
It is deliberately left undefined. A fair use is an otherwise infringing use which, under the totality of the circumstances, is fair. There are tests to help determine fairness, and there are trends as to the sorts of things that often are fair or unfair, but ultimately it is meant to be a a way of handling minor, otherwise infringing acts which should be allowed in the spirit of copyright, rather than the letter of the law; and it is a way of handling unusual and unforeseen acts.
If you want specific exceptions for specific things, whether they are narrow or broad, that's fine, but then they should exist in addition to fair use, since they could never suffice to replace it.
Remember, both law and equity are part of our legal traditions; don't be surprised that fair use is rooted in the latter.
And what's even better is when I try to cite the safe harbor laws or portion limits on Slashdot, I'm ridiculed over and over (not that I've ever practiced law but as a citizen it's the most I can find) despite my analysis being correct!
Fair use has no such things. I'm sorry that you are upset when people point this out to you. The best people can manage with fair use is to look at a number of cases, and try to discern trends. But each fair use case being unique, trends are of limited utility. There have been cases where small amounts of material were quoted from a work, and it was not fair, and there have been cases where entire works have been copied, and it was fair.
If you're really interested in trying to know when a use is fair or not, I'd suggest learning the test and reading a number of the leading cases on fair use, including the recounting of the facts of the case, so you know just what the particular use happened to be. But this will only at best put you at the level of legal scholars, lawyers, judges, etc. who get it wrong fairly often. Courts have a hard time working out fair use, and reversals on appeal are not uncommon. It's just a difficult thing, and it can't be helped without destroying fair use in the process.
Again, I think you'd be much better off leaving fair use (and your criticisms of it) aside, and instead pushing for additional statutory exceptions which would avoid your having to rely on fair use for things you wanted to do, while still leaving it in place for those who did need to rely on it.
For example, I would like to see an exception that made any otherwise infringing act non-infringing (or at least non-actionable) if it was engaged in by a natural person, and was not commercial in nature or for profit, without affecting secondary liability. The idea being that Alice could engage in file sharing, but Bob could not run a torrent tracker that carried advertisements, or required a fee to access, nor could Carol require that people adhere to a particular ratio of uploads to downloads, nor could Dave sell the software used for this. Thus while we might reduce the amount of money that could be exploited from a particular copyright, at least about all the money there was to be had would still be funneled to the copyright holder. It also legitimizes a lot of what people are doing already, kind of like repealing Prohibition.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I feel like you are on some level being disingenuous here. Fair Use is intentionally ambiguous, since it is a question of spirit, not just enumerating that which is permitted. Pretending that distributing whole tracks or episodes of a show, even with your own work on top of it, doesn't excessively advantage from the work the original artists put into it, to score pedant points, borders on intentionally naive.
The law is the best reference for this. 17 USC 107 lists the four factors to test, and gives illustrative (and not exclusive) examples to show what the purpose behind the doctrine is. If you are trying to do something that uses the work as a basis, you probably have a problem. If you are trying to merely talk about the work, and use small snippets of it to that end, you are probably ok. And then copying your own copies for your own exclusive purposes is ok.
Parody gets a little tougher to talk about, since the case-law makes the distinction that what is meant is critical parody (which makes sense, given that it fits the pattern of the permitted classes), and not parody as a back-door to making a derivative work (in the Weird-Al sense). Note that Fair Use is not unique here: like any case that wanders too close to the boundaries of the law, you have to take it to a courtroom to know for sure. Wikipedia offers Mattel, Inc. v. Walking Mountain Productions and Art Rogers v. Jeff Koons as cases to reference.