SR

it’s truly disgusting that people would do this not only wihtout attribution, but ignoring the rules of fair use and more, without paying you any sum of money. in the world of print, this would not happen as readily (tho it does happen) the rules are far stricter since it is plagerism. it also is on the Web but unfortunately since the Web is like the Wild Wild West, one has little recourse…

i totally understand your frustration and anger- my advice, contact those people and threaten legal action if need be…

thanks for chiming in with your comment… it’s a good one…

be well

s.r.p.

that’s all… it was not a slam against Kinkos, merely an example. i hope this clarifies somewhat.

thanks and be well,

srp

Kinko’s employees may or may not be ignorant of fair use law, but the corporation already got nailed once and it appears they don’t intend for it to happen again.
http://promotetheprogress.com/archives/2004/08/kinkos_wont_hel.html

And one of the above commenters is right; there are NO hard and fast rules on how much of a work is too much. At the last library I worked at doing e-reserves we would allow absolutely no fiction to be scanned and uploaded. Not because it wasn’t fair use; because the copyright librarian did not feel qualified to determine what constituted the “heart’ of the piece. For nonfiction, we would allow one chapter or 10% whichever was less. If a book only had 4 equal length chapters there was a good possibility that that one chapter wasn’t going on e-reserves. This stance is rather conservative, but at $150k per infringement….

I dont agree with fair use laws all the time by any stretch and this aritlce was never that intention; merely laying out the law of the land. One thing i will say is that i think you are right about the photographs but everyone knows “images are trickier’ yet nobody has a solution. I think it woud depend on the kind of license the perosn had on the work: attribution, no attribution, share and share alike and so on… If you can’t track down the photographer then the government would say that is prob. your own issue, though i wouldn’t necessarily agree.

the question , or rather the thing i always do is use the Kantian rule… Would i want someone doing this with MY work and in most cases though not all, the answer is no unless i give persmission. That much seems fair to me ~~ other than that, would be lengthy and i’ll give my personal opinions on that ASAP… that should be an interesting piece.

cheers ~ i think you and i agree, but the law is just so complicated and muddled and nonsensical. It seems arbitrary to me and i hate that.

s.r.p.

However, the pictures are copyrighted by default — unless I got the guy to sign something saying they were works-for-hire. Of course, I have no idea where this fellow is, he doesn’t need to register his copyright (or even put on the back of the pictures).

I somehow cannot see this as a success of copyright - maybe for the photographer, if he could enforce people only buying new copies from him, but hardly for a customer. If this photographer had to pay for the privilege of keeping these copyrights, I think my pictures would somehow no longer be copyrighted by him.

2) Fiction using common themes, or sharing characters — again, if you do another in this series, I hope you touch on derivative works.

My point was that I could make a character SIMILAR to Harry Potter in many ways without using a single word of the original book. Yet, somehow, that’s derived and thus infringement?
By the same token, why isnt fiction with characters from commercial fiction considered fair use if its not distributed for profit, eg, the often poorly written slash stories found on the net that sites are routinely shut down for.

The criteria - non comerrcial, small portion of the work (just the characters, not even the settings or any of the words), and not likely to impact the market for the original. Yet its not fair use?

3) You didn’t touch on attribution — whether its required for fair use, or whether it’s just being polite (or part of the terms of unviersity publishing… )

Thanks again for your articles,
and I appreciate you answering my somewhat offbeat questions.

Nagle, as far as music, it seems that many small sections of music can be considered infringement. This produces incentives for record labels to pool their copyrights to avoid legal trouble, and ensure that a consistently high quality of music at reasonable prices results for the customer by averting the threat of rogue labels that might yield subpar material.

Stanford Guide to Fair Use ,

Essay: How I learned to love fair use

Summary of fair use cases .

BTW, I’ve read contradictory information about the 10%/30 seconds guideline for music. There is no hard and fast rule, and sometimes borrowing a few bars have been sufficient to trigger legal action.

1 What price free content will be appearing on this site any day now, just as soon as David and i can manage, so that should be soon, I’ll give him a nudge on that one,

2. Photographs: photographs are protected differently because if you think of it reasonably, how can you take 10% of one photograph? A copyshop is rather ignorant in most of these matters though and you should, i believe, have every right to use an image PROVIDED it is for purposes of review/criticism/journalism or even educational purposes yet there are some resitrictions, again the !0% of the work rule applies, but as a journalist, i could use a whole photograph, but kinkos would still give me a hard time mostly out of ignorance of the law. no offense to kinkos or employees but we are entitled to use images from a film etc to promote it which is why they SEND them to use in the press packet.

2. Hairy Potter ~ great title. Not sure why you can’t do that. Titles for one are not copyrighted and this isn’t even the same title. is it a spinoff in any way of the same book or a parody? if so, then you are using more than 10% of the original to create your new original (does that make sense) so you can’t do that… you’d have to create entirely new characters and with different stories and back stories etc. in which case, i would see no problem at all with that and would even hire an attorney to argue this because that sounds too fascist to me, even and i’m all for fair use but this whole Harry Potter thing has gotten out of control.

3. Yes the government is the one providing the rules and thta is why i used government and university sites because we can’t have any resonable discussion about copyright or fairuse without first knowing the law. I disagree with a lot of things and i’ll be writing about those too but i felt it important to get the offical law out there so that we know whereof we speak… Does that make sense?

I hope so.

I tried to address most of your questions: send another note if i have left anything out, because likely i have and this is interesting to me as ever; being relatively new here i am trying to set out the law and get things from a govt. and legal perspective so we can then give our OWN POV based on that information…

hope that helps some. and thanks for reading. i realize that was long….

s.r.p.

Perhaps you can continue at some point with a better explanation of just what a derivative work is, and when it does/doesn’t count as fair use. How is it that I can’t write a story about “hairy peter”, a young russian bear that wants to become a necromancer, even if I have no words in common with another famous book.

In fair use terms, if the reuse of a single photograph is considered fair use, why is it that some retail outlets refuse to make single copies of professionally made photographs?

In the fair use law quoted, attribution isn’t directly mentioned. Does this mean that I can take a single line of a few of your different poems ( keeping to 1 line from each to be well within fair use) and use them them as filenames for freely available but hideously grotesque images?

lastly, what is the copyright status on your informative post here, and what is fair use copying from it. Is this response a derivative work (or would it be if I quoted your post?)

Finally, and not intended as a flame, isn’t the government is the one providing protection for copyright and making the rules? Regardless of whether or not there are reasons for the rules (which are good to see mentioned in passing, and could be nice in a “why copyright” context), only the government has the power to adjust the laws to handle cultural changes. Who else can be blamed?
PS… is there a link to your “What price free content” paper?