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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Lets start with the fact that what you consider fair use and what the law considers fair use might be two very different things.
Lets examine your story for a moment.
1. You both own copies of the same book. Ok, fair enough.
2. You scan your copy creating a second copy that you now possess. Again, fair enough.
3. You give one of the copies you have made to a friend. Now, I am not a lawyer, let alone one specializing in intellectual property, but I believe this is the point where you have violated fair use.
You have made additional copies of a work and given them to someone else. The fact that said person owns a copy of the book in another format is besides the point. If you had legally purchased an electronic copy and gave it to your friend, that would be different (Though you would not be able to retain a electronic copy of your own). It would be different if you let him use your scanner to make a copy himself. It might also be different if you used his legal copy to make an electronic copy. But the facts of the story presented is that you used your copy to make an electronic copy which you then gave to him.
Remember, copyright is there to give authors incentives to write and publish. I don't know exactly how far fair use extends, but I do know that without the permission of the author and/or the publisher of a copyrighted work, it is not fair game for a citizen to make and distribute full copies of an author's work. You purchased one copy, that copy (And perhaps an archival copy) is all that you are permitted to use.
If the friend in this story wanted an electronic copy badly enough to take on his trip, he could either purchase an electronic copy himself or purchase a scanner and make an electronic copy for himself.
To put it in simple terms. While any work is under copyright, you may own the medium, but you don't own the work. Only the author and whomever he has granted rights to owns the work. In the United States, only specific legal exemptions (most notably, but not necessarily limited to fair use) can constrain the author's ability to dictate how a work is distributed and used.
To extend your argument that you have already paid for the work. Lets look at it from a different perspective. Lets say you have purchased copy of the book electronically already. Does that mean you are entitled to a paper copy of the book? No of course not, each time you purchase a book, you are paying a royalty to the author and the publisher. Previous payment of said royalty does not exempt you from paying future royalties.
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I hope you realize how non-sense some of this. Say the friend borrows me his copy of the book, and I use his copy to make him a pdf, then its suddendly fair use?
And seriously to say you need to buy it 2 times if you want to have it on 2 mediums is just wrong. This is what fair use law was all about. You do *not* own just that one medium you bought, which you are not allowed to copy at all for personal use. Its an interesting question what you actually buy if you buy a copy of a copyrighted material, since it is more and less at the same time than buying just the medium (and say i can do with the medium what i want), its also more and less at the same time than saying you actually buy the content. The best thing this is to said, is that you buy a "right of use" that includes certain things but does not include other things....
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Once the bike is reported stolen, if you determine who stole it on your own, it might in fact be illegal not to accuse the thief. It could be considered obstruction of a police investigation.
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In my story I did not report it, I just see it the next hour after I notice it missing. (I hope you don't forget about the analogy here)