Quote:
Originally Posted by gweeks
Not entirely. The US copyright law has the concept of a statutory copyright license. It mostly applies to music, but it is in place specifically to stop you from being able to "not publish" a work. Anyone may publish it as long as they pay the statutory license rate to you. This is what allows anyone to make a cover recording of a song. It's not a universal part of the copyright law, so it mostly doesn't apply to books. There are parts of it that do apply to books.
Greg
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I seem to recall reading that this is a deal that exclusive to music. Up until fairly recently, the US has been very loose with regards to copyrights. Even now, copyright in the US has a lot of fair use exclusions and exceptions. As a general rule of thumb, unless you are actively pirating from the stand point of trying to make money off someone elses' work or in someway damaging the copyright holders' ability to make money, you are pretty safe. Of course, as is always the case, that is subject to change if you run across the wrong judge.
Also keep in mind that different mediums can get treated differently. Movies get treated differently than music, which gets treated differently than books.