What is Fair Use in the Digital Age? 199
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."
Fair use is very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fair use is very simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair use (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a yin and yang - downloading or fiddling around with videos or music may cost some sales, but it can also generate new fans, who will purchase when they otherwise wouldn't. So what if splicing 3 or 4 clips together doesn't have much artistic merit? That's a purely subjective call, and in this age, it seems that computer software is the popular artistic tool of choice.
Not just the RIAA (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree though that the digital age really makes no difference. The real change has been a shift is society's values. Me, me, me!
Re:I'm not confused but the headline is! (Score:4, Insightful)
Books begat films, character merchandising, giant fan guides, remix videos, fan art and other
forms of secondary authorship that simply didn't exist 100 years ago.
100 years ago we didn't have Disney fucking with Copyright then (the Mickey Mouse and Sonny Bono Protection Acts [wikipedia.org] only came about in 1976!) So for us to even bring that shit up in this modern discussion is nothing short of ridiculous.
Let's face the facts here... Copyright has been extended to an unreasonable point so that nothing will ever enter the Public Domain so if anything is different in the "Digital Age" it's the fact that we're more fucked than ever before.
Boo.
Re:I'm not confused but the headline is! (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:While his point is that fair use is more of a privilege than a right, I think there's a much different interpretation of what he's saying that is important to consider.
He's absolutely correct that fair use isn't a right, it's an exception. But it's an exception to the rights of the copyright holder. And this distinction is important because it underscores how entertainment companies misrepresent copyright. Rather than copyright defining the few excepted uses allowed to people/entities who don't hold the copyright, it actually defines the few rights granted exclusively to the copyright holder.
And this is an important observation about the intent of copyright. Namely, that anything not explicitly granted to the copyright holder is permissible rather than forbidden. The big content producers would like copyright to be a limited set of things that we (those not producing the content) are allowed to do with their content, which they believe they own. But when defending our rights, it's important to remember that copyright is actually a limited set of things that we're not allowed to do and that content cannot be owned, only protected. And this is the principle that should be applied whenever something falls outside of what is explicitly stated in the Copyright Act...that everything not covered is allowed rather than forbidden.
AMV = Perfect examples of fair use (Score:3, Insightful)
And last, but not least, AMV Hell 3: The Motion Picture [youtube.com] and AMV Hell 4: The last one [youtube.com]. Some of the clips there got me laughing for hours.
What would be of Entertainment and creativity online if all the music and anime producers sued the AMV makers for copyright infringement?
Re:Fair use is very simple (Score:3, Insightful)
The majority of the anime mashup music videos are crap and don't really "inject original contribution" but there are some that are quite well done. [youtube.com] The problem with having a requirement of "something that truly injects some degree of original contribution" is that what qualifies is entirely subjective. What is a subtle but relevant addition to some kid making a video might just be worthless crap to a sixty year old judge. Artistic tastes are to vague to be a part of the law.
Re:Someone didn't read the article... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry to reply again, but this [eff.org] might be of interest:
Re:I'm not confused but the headline is! (Score:1, Insightful)
That's facially true, but it raises an important point -- given that in the U.S., parties pay their own court costs, even where the fair use defense is clear (which is rare), lawsuits still have deterrent value if they can be levied at ordinary citizens, because of the inevitable cost of defending the suit. The subtle burden-allocation here is a significant part of the problem, really.
What about things INTENDED to be part of something (Score:5, Insightful)
Same for stock photography and stock video providers -- their GOAL is to provide raw material as input into a larger work. They spend a lot of time and money shooting and editing stock. If you claim any use of their work is fair use (it's always incorporated into a larger whole, and often transformed along the way) then stock photographers and videographers can't get paid (all use is fair use--why pay for it) and might just stop producing stock material. It's a huge benefit to illustrators and designers to have stock photography and video available. (As an aside, some stock photographers create really good work [photographersdirect.com])
How does he address the fact that some people design work with the hopes of being paid by producers who will assemble it into a larger whole, and that producers are glad to have designer's work available?
Clarify? (Score:3, Insightful)
And who gets to determine what "adds value"? Here's a random example I just came across today that rides the line: the full Steve Jobs Keynote vs. this 60 second recap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz1-cPx0cIk [youtube.com]
That can both substitute for the original, and yet I think adds value. Not just by being short and informative, but by satirizing and commenting on the effects of 89 minutes of fluff marketing. Is it fair use?
Cheers.
Re:Fair use (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What about things INTENDED to be part of someth (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:debate bias? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fair use is very simple (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't really see a way you can have your cake and eat it too. It's the same with people complaining about not being able to resell ebooks. If that was legal, it'd be worse than legalizing filesharing - it'd be legalizing the profiting off illegal distribution of works. This isn't an argument about copyright - assuming you're ok with the idea of having a much smaller copyright time period, this argument still applies, though less so (you could resell it just fine after copyright has expired). If you're against copyright entirely, then we're probably at odds here.
On the other hand, if you have an idea for how to make this work, without intrusive DRM and without basically making it legal for those people in China selling DVDs on the street, then I'm all ears.