Re: More on copyright

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org> wrote in message news:<3CDC8F3F.16D71C00@acm.org>...
 
> The right of individuals to make copies of copyrighted material for
> their own personal non-commercial use has been established by the courts
> as fair use. Some examples include recording TV shows and backing up
> software.

No, that's misleading and wrong, as is your previous post. Please
don't invent.
It sounds like you have not even read the copyright statute. The right
to make
backup copies is NOT fair use, it is a statuory provision, see section
117 of the copyright code. This section at least is something everyone
should read,
see the previous message in the thread for a link to the statute.

The right to record TV shows on conventional VCR tapes for the purpose
of time shifting was indeed estanlished by the Sony case, but for
example, the right to record on digital apparatus that includes a
mechanism for skipping commercials is not clearly covered and is
currently being contested. The Sony
case decision is really quite limited, and does not for instance
clearly cover
making a VCR tape of a show for a friend. That might be fair use, but
I don't
think you can find a specific case that says it is.

Of course in practice things that individuals do on a sufficiently
small
scale does not get onto the radar screen (that does not mean it is
legal
or fair use, just that no one will bother to sue in practice, the most
you
might get is a cease and desist, for example if you put up a personal
web
site with some star trek images, Paramount will probably tell you to
close
down your site, but probably will not sue).

So if you bleep your own Titanic tape, who knows whether that is OK,
and probably who cares. But when you offer a service for bleeping
other people's
Titanic tapes, that's another matter. Similarly, MP3.COM provided a
service to
enable people to do something that lots of people assume is fair use
(ripping
a CD you own to put on your own MP3 player), but as a service, it was
found
illegal, with damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Fair use
is one
of the very few cases where doing something once can be legal, but
doing
it more than once may be illegal (I know of only one other example,
marriage!)

Fair use is a particularly tricky part of the law, as MP3.COM
discovered!

One general point to acquire from a thread like this is that copyright
law
is quite complex, and that you can't rely on common sense as to what
is
reasonable and what is not. Nor can you rely on other people's
pronouncements
since many of these come from limited knowledge, mixed in with such
common
sense :-)

This thread is of course not particularly relevant to Ada, but some
awareness
of copyright is important. That's particularly true when using freely
downloaded software. If you download a file that has a GPL notice in
it, this
does not mean you have a right to use it. It might be that the GPL
notice was
written by someone who did not have the rights to do so (as in the
event that
started this thread), or perhaps the software contravenes someone
elses patent
rights, in which case you can end up responsible. Nothing special
about freely
downloaded software here of course, the same is true for commercial
software,
although in that case you presumably have a formal license from some
company
which does take responsibility. Again, what you do for your own
private use
is unlikely to be a problem in practice, but as soon as you go outside
this
(e.g. by selling or widely distributing, or widely announcing on a
news group
etc), you are definitely raising the stakes.