Quote:
Originally Posted by shalym
There's also the issue (in my opinion) that neither the HathiTrust case nor the Google case have anything at ALL to do with format shifting by an individual of materials that the individual owns. Both of the cases quincy cites are about companies scanning books and making the scans (or portions of the scans) available to the public in some way. So...even if those cases had been won by the Author's Guild, and the scanning was ruled to be infringement, they would still have no bearing on a case of an individual scanning books that he or she owns.
Shari
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Exactly.
Those cases are really about distribution, not about *using* one's property, which is what fair use is primarily about.
Betamax was decided on the basis that timeshifting was a fair use of legally acquired content and that devices that enable fair use are legal. It established that modifying content and storing the modified derivative for personal use is legal. (Sling boxes are likewise legal although their purpose is place-shifting, which is a form of distribution but on a one to one basis.) The RIAA vs Diamond multimedia lawsuit then established that transcoding and format shifting of digital music/content was legal. The key point? Personal use.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...MP3+Player.htm
Personal use is about enjoying the benefit of what one personally owns, which is derived from the constitutional rights to property in the US. Which means no law is required to grant them.
Now, property rights are not universally recognized outside the US. For example, outside the US mineral rights most commonly belong to the state rather than the nominal deed holder (a holdover from medieval times and the territorial state, when everybody was a tenant on the king's personal property--the state.) Whereas in the US, the owner of a plot owns it all the way to the center of the earth and can exploit those rights at will. Or at least, that is the default. It is then up to the goverment to justify why drilling for oil in manhattan should not be permitted. But it is up to the govetnment to prove why not, not the citizen to prove why.
No law was needed to explicitly permit timeshifting, place shifting, or format shifting. What *was* needed was a legal justification for prohibiting it and the failure to do so allowed the status quo to prevail; legal unless expressly forbidden.