Coding Fair Use 109
An Anonymous Coward writes: "A report from CFP2002 on the tension between making fair use clear and retaining ambiguity to facilitate the application of fair use to future technologies." Lots of good papers available from the Fair Use By Design workshop and the conference in general.
Do The Math (Score:4, Insightful)
You can keep passing laws but you cannot enforce the laws already in place as there are just way too many laws and even more people to break them.
If you can't enforce all the laws for all the people, then of necessity you must choose which laws you will enforce, when you will enforce them and who you will enforce them on.
In the world we live in right now- resources are not going to be primarily aimed at keeping content locked up. There are larger, more pressing issues. (like staying alive)
Content creators need to take some of that creativity and look for new ways to make it self sustaining.
It makes me think of self defense moves where you use the weight and inertia of a large aggressor against them. Content creators need to stop fighting what is an unstoppable force and find a way to ride that force to succes.
Easy to say, hard to do? Sure but what is worthwhile that isn't difficult?
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Everything as pay per view (Score:4, Insightful)
An audience member asks if this ambiguity is what lets lawyers threaten people with lawsuits for non-infringing uses, intimidating them into taking down Web content that should remain public. We need a floor, von Lohmann says, not a ceiling on permissible activities.
The floor for the entertainment and other "content" industries is increasingly clear. They don't fundamentally believe in fair use, and they see technology as a way to turn everything into pay-per-view, a system that would eliminate fair use almost completely.
This impulse has been around for a while under different names.
It used to be known as "Killing the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg"
Fair use need to be somehow writtin into law, but I do not see a quick way around someone who decides to sell something only on a pay perview basis. With a wide enough reach (such as the Internet) you can generally get enough people to support the market, even if they are only the tiniest fraction of the population.
Example: Spam
Re:Heh (Score:0, Insightful)
Yeah, right. You're thinking about the Slashdot crowd.
99.99% of the population are "consumers". You know, the type that won't bother/don't know how to programming the timer on their VCR.
"ownership" of content? (Score:5, Insightful)
The piece makes mention of the entertainment industry trying to move everything to pay-per-view. Clearly, that would be ideal for them. But lost in that worldview is the idea that once I "buy" a bit of content, it's "mine" to do with as I choose, short of republication.
Example: I buy a book. I can read it zero or more times. I can pull pages out and rearrange them or stick them on my wall. I can make a photocopy of portions and keep those pages in my car. I can give the book to a friend, but I'm not allowed to copy the book and give it to a friend.
This right is, of course, what the fair use clauses are meant to protect.
Copyright law is really (or should be!) about publishing--no one but the owner of the "rights" to a piece of work has the legal right to publish it.
Perhaps it's all semantics (but isn't that what the law and politics are about?), but it seems to me we should stop talking about copy rights and start talking about publish rights. Put the battle into the right geography: It's not about making copies but about distributing copies.
If we managed to change the language to a language of publish rights instead of copy rights, then perhaps terms like "piracy" would simply vanish. And, it seems to me, coding protections for publish rights while also coding protections for fair use rights would be less ambiguous and more achievable.
Re:RIAA in a nut shell.. (Score:2, Insightful)
And now that they making it like just listening to a song without writin a check is a crime in principle, its not like they can easily backpedal to get they users back. Tryin to re-introduce fair use just gone make them look like punks, and bust open a pandora's box of justifications for all kinds of piracy. I can hear it now "I'm fits ta help the RIAA win they business back by burnin copies of this CD fo my homies!"
When people gone recognize that this kind of scorched earth campaign is bad for everyone concerned?
Re:"ownership" of content? (Score:2, Insightful)
So (A) is legal, (B) is legal, but (A && B) is illegal. That's a non-linearity in the legal system and everyone knows that non-linear constraints are harder to enforce in general.
Re:please restrict fair use (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem comes in that we, as a whole, are no longer reasonable in allowing permission. Who was to blame first in the whole RIAA/P2P debacle? Pick a side - it doesn't matter, really. Everyone has chosen their positions, no one is willing to budge, and the only thing that will ever solve this is one big courtroom brawl.
Frankly, I'm so disgusted with the whole mess, I've stopped buying music, downloading, or providing music to anyone.
When did we, as a society, lose our ability to be "reasonable"?
Re:Do The Math (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see what speeding has to do with copyright. In one case (speeding) people break the law and are caught. In the other (copyright) industry is attempting to make breaking the law difficult or impossible.
To equate speeding with copyright would require making cars that go over the speed limit illegal. Then doing away with traffic cops and radar guns entirely. This might stop freeway speeding, but it wouldn't catch out of control or dangerous drivers at all.
Vital, vital additions. (Score:3, Insightful)
* Likewise, quoting, resampling and reframing as part of critical practice and in research shall not entail enfringment.
Re:All my commercial software is licensed (Score:3, Insightful)
I sure hope so. 99% of the software licenses out there, including many open source licenses, are either illegal or a slap in the face of the legal principles of civilization.
These licenses purport to be contracts. But they are not. There is no consideration. No possibility of negotiation. And no valid assent. Just because a license says you have agreed to something does not make it so.
You walk into a store and buy a copy of Windows XP. Guess what? You now have the legal right to use that software, to sell your only copy of it, to make archival copies, to reverse engineer it, and to install it on any computer that you own. But when you go to try to install it, you see a license. This license is not a contract. There is no consideration, since the license does not offer you anything you don't already have. In fact, it attempts to take away legal rights that you already possess. There is no possibility for negotiation, since Microsoft was not present at the time you purchased it, nor are they present when you must click "I Accept". Nor is there assent, even by clicking that button that says you assent. Because you already have the right to install the software, pushing that button is legally meaningless. Furthermore, you can always get someone else to push that button, so there is no way in hell that Microsoft can even begin to demonstrate that you assented to the license.
I'm waiting for the day when some major commercial software package comes with a only a single line copyright: Copyright 2002 Fubar Company. How much more intellectual property protection does a company need than that?
Shrink-wrap, click-thru, and the every increasingly popular "use-wrap" licenses are fraudulent pieces of legal tripe. They make great tools for intimidation, but their legal worth is less than that of used toilet paper.