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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Can you track down the law for this? I know many institutions--schools, businesses, nonprofits, and so on--have guidelines meant to keep them from being sued, but most guidelines I've seen have been built around "this is the maximum we're sure is safe," not "this is the maximum allowed by law."
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
One part that leaps out at me is that teachers can reproduce "1% of the work per three-month period". So I'm guessing of the average text book, that's a couple of pages, twice per semester. And presumably under this rule they can make as many copies of those 2 pages and hand them to every pupil in the class.
The other is that librarians may
not make "more than one copy of the article or more than one article contained in the same issue of a periodical". (
link) That link also has provisions that the librarian isn't supposed to photocopy the same article for your mate, if he asks for the it immediately after you leave (or, I think, another article from the same magazine; but they're allowed to make a copy for someone else, on a different "occasion"; i.e the next day or the next week). The "reasonable proportion of a literary, artistic or musical work" (mentioned on the wikipedia page) would probably be determined to be not more than a typical chapter.
Of course all libraries have self-service coin-operated photocopiers, and have done for years. These rules - or some guidelines based on them - are taped to the top of the copier's lid.
But the point is that limitations upon fair use copying of printed matter is fairly well-established here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
There is something nonsensical about this approach.
I have dozens of boxes of paperbacks. (Mostly sitting in storage lockers; house doesn't have room.) I could, theoretically, chop, scan & convert them all to ebooks. And then what? I'm morally, maybe legally, obligated to keep a collection of thousands of damaged books to prove I've got a right to my ebooks? And if I decide they're taking too much space, I can burn them or shred them, but not give them away?
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Well, under current copyright law, I don't see how you can prove that your digitised collection is actually fair use (format shifting, like ripping your CDs to MP3) without retaining the physical copy.
Apple ship iTunes with the ability to convert your CDs in to MP3s. I don't think you could be successfully prosecuted today for doing the equivalent thing with your books.
If you give the physical copy away and keep the digital copy then you have allowed two people to retain copies of a book that was sold for one person to read at a time. The precedent established by paper books (
doctrine of first sale &c &c) is that you're allowed to transfer the book to someone else, but by doing so you deprive yourself of the copy.
Analogy: You're allowed to create MP3s of your CDs with iTunes, but you can get into trouble if you share those MP3s on the internet.
You should remember that I've prefixed a number of my own comments by saying that I don't agree with the way copyright is currently managed, but I believe I'm giving a sound interpretation of the current law / practice. So there's no point in taking issue with those of my comments and saying "that's totally crazy, mate" - I agree with you!
We're making do with legislation which was enacted for obsolete technologies, we're bolting stuff on to try and make sense of that (or make "analogies" of those old technologies in an attempt to apply them to the current ones) and also our legislators are bought and sold by the Disney Corporation. Honestly and personally, I don't expect any of this to make sense until the Roman Empire has fallen again, and we start writing our rules again from scratch.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
There's something horrifically wasteful about this approach, about insisting that all these powerful digitizing tools can't be used to *increase* access to knowledge; it has to stay a zero-sum game based on the amount of paper that's been paid for.
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I totally agree with you, mate. I very much believe that the digital revolution allows us to share the gifts of knowledge and art with the world's poor at barely any cost.
I certainly think the first step would be differing sets of criteria for commercial and non-commercial infringement. But Hollywood ain't going to go for that, and it's them what pay the politicians.