Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
Eminent Domain = the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation.
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I think fjtorres meant that the government can't just take privately owned properties like books from the author and distribute them to others with a bit of compensation provided to them. The government (usually on local level) has been known to seize land such as right of ways connected with where a new road is planned with monies given to the land owner as compensation. So if you are on your own private land and the government decides it wants to build a road over it they can claim eminent domain and take the land in exchange for compensation given to you. I don't think they will ever extend that to books myself. After all how could they justify taking let's say a poem that I wrote and putting it in Public Domain while I'm still living? What purpose could that serve? Eminent Domain is usually applied to tangible assets such as land, not intellectual assets like literature.
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I'm well aware that it was an attempt to assert that copyright is property without explicitly saying so. Once again, copyright is not property, it's a limited time monopoly on the right to copy something. If you want to use an analogy, then lease is much more correct than property.
One of the funny things about the US legal system is that the law is whatever you can convince a judge and jury of. Thus it is certainly possible that some legal eagle might assert the novel legal doctrine that one can use eminent domain with regards to copyright. People have stretched the law a lot farther than that in the past.
But in the case of copyright, in the US, the government is allowed to issue fair use exceptions. Thus, it's much more likely that if the government wants to use your poem, they would simply say that governmental use is a fair use exception and be on much more solid legal footing.