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Originally Posted by leebase
The notion that folks should be able to infringe someone else's rights in a "sue me if you don't like it" mentality is screwed up.
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That's exactly how all civil (not criminal) law works. Anyone is free to violate copyright, ignore their own warranty claims, slander someone else, or commit medical malpractice, and the state won't step in to fix it unless someone sues.
Technically, every time we use the "reply with quote" function, we could be violating copyright. We are quoting without permission. We *hope* that such quotes are within the limits of fair use--but often, the entire original post is quoted. While the TOS grants the forum owner the right to copy one's posts (in order to be able to share them with other servers), no such specific right has been granted to all other members of the forum. Anyone (who had a particularly well-drugged IP lawyer in their pocket) could sue another forum member for copyright infringement.
"Sue me if you don't like it" is how copyright law works.
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In due time the rights will expire. THEN folks can have at it. And yes, "due time" is a matter of opinion, but we are talking law, not opinion. And yes, laws change -- but I'd not advocate for your view of "take what you want until someone sues you".
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If I were posting at my blog about copyright infringement & opinions about it (which I do, fairly often), I might quote your paragraph there. In which case, I'd be taking what I wanted and saying "sue me if you care to, if it's worth it to you; I think this is legal use, but if you don't--there's a large court system you can engage to argue your opinion."
A lot of supposed "infringements" are very, very blurry. I don't believe there's ever been a successful case prosecuting free digital distribution of material where there's no legit digital version available, like the Harry Potter books, much less free digital copies of out-of-print or orphan works. The Church of Scientology has a long history of trying to prosecute usenet users for copyright infringement--and failing.