Quote:
Originally Posted by doreenjoy
Huh. I never knew my first amendment rights meant that I can sell others' creations for profit to myself. Gotta get back to constitutional law class...
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Not specifically that, no--but "to promote science and the useful arts," you might argue you should be able to:
Take 2 chapters from each of 5 different nonfiction books, combine them into 1 book, and put a brief essay between the chapters explaining the relevance and contrasts between them.
Reprint a book that's out of print to share it with a new audience.
Collect photographs of a hundred weddings to place in a book about photography styles.
Take someone's entire dissertation, and go through it line-by-line analyzing and critiquing its findings.
Republish movies in digital form, charging enough for the download to cover the bandwidth & conversion costs.
Collect "favorite songs of teens at [x] high school" onto a cd, capturing a particular moment of cultural interest.
... and so on. There's plenty of reasons why use of someone else's materials can be a free speech issue, whether or not profit is involved. Requiring licensing or permission for these is an infringement of free speech rights. (IMHO, mostly a reasonable one. Free speech isn't an absolute right, just something that has to be carefully considered when assigning other rights & restrictions.)