On Oct 8, 2:42 pm, Stewart Schooley wrote:
flipper wrote:
On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 23:12:20 -0400, Stewart Schooley
wrote:

flipper wrote:

On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 21:42:25 -0400, Stewart Schooley
wrote:

Your account doesn't take into consideration the "fair use" doctrine of
U.S. law.

The "fair use" exemption to (U.S.) copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's vital so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works

Notice the words research and education.

Also this;

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered "fair," such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

Teaching, scholarship, and research

Stewart

Not applicable

It is applicable because the OP didn't give a complete accounting of
copyright law.

That is a non-sequitur. Just being a 'part of the law' somewhere
doesn't make it applicable and there is a lot of copyright law that
hasn't been mentioned... reason being it isn't, as I said, applicable.

Read the OT again and you'll see that it is presented as a tutorial on
copyright law and near the end we read this comment;

CAN COPYRIGHT LAW REALLY BE THIS SIMPLE AND STRAIGHFORWARD?

I think Flipper is right, actually; there is no way, nor any need, to
include all of copyright law. I also say, though admittedly near the
end, "I hope these notes help everyone understand why it is theft to
give away copies of the RDH4 on the internet." That makes clear what I
consider the limits of my piece to be. On the other hand, one doesn't
want to label honest teachers or critics thieves, or gratuitously give
them cause to worry, so I have taken your suggestion and published a
revised version to include fair use. It is in a separate thread called
"RDH4 COPYRIGHT -- THE MASTER FACT FILE -- reprised".

The purpose of my post was to point out that there is another part of
copyright law that can be very ambiguous at times.

Fair use doesn't have to be difficult for those of honest purpuse and
the slightest discrimination. It is only when people on either side
push their luck and behave unreasonably that difficulties arise.

This was for readers
that may not have researched copyright law. The fair use doctrine came
about because of lawsuits and court decisions. Today, spoof, parody, and
sarcasm are pretty well protected so the question becomes how much of a
copyrighted work can be excerpted for scholarship and research.

Consider this, if an electronics teacher uses RDH4 as a resource for his
classes over an entire semester, at what point does he violate copyright
laws?

Ha! You *would* choose a rather difficult example. But, hey, I'm
always game.

I don't think that anyone would doubt that copying an entire book would
be breaking the law.

The RDH4 is made up of chapters collected from different authors, so
clearly a whole chapter or a substantial part of a chapter would be
excessive. On the other hand, the chapters are long and the print
fine, so perhaps as much as a third to half a page of extract or
quotation from any chapter would be considered reasonable as long as
you added several times that much material of your own to your
finished piece. I reckon a teacher could teach a semester or even two
out ot the RDH, taking one or two third-page extracts or maybe one of
those dense graphs or tables, each week from a *different* chapter as
the basis for a 50 minute lecture, without doing violence to fair use
for each of the units he extracted from. The difficulty would arise
were he to distribute an entire chapter as the basis for any unit of
work, or any substantial part of any chapter even piecemeal over a
period of a year, or take even half a page from *each* of the
chapters, all the time edging closer to unfair practice. This is your
question, so where would you draw the line of judgement?

I will grant you that my response to you should have been; It is
applicable to this thread because the OT didn't give a complete
accounting of copyright law.

I'm happy to include fair use because it is the decent and
constructive obverse of immoral copyright theft, but I don't pretend
to a complete accounting of copyright law in the compass of a few
hundred words.

Stewart

Andre Jute
Visit Jute on Amps at http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/
"wonderfully well written and reasoned information
for the tube audio constructor"
John Broskie TubeCAD & GlassWare
"an unbelievably comprehensive web site
containing vital gems of wisdom"
Stuart Perry Hi-Fi News & Record Review