Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Google is a parasite, but no-one should be able to copyright an API. So in this case I'm glad Google/Alphabet won. They however lied about the use of scanned books and won that case unfairly.
It's not even an expansion of fair use. It was a crazy thing.
There has to be damage proved with alleged copyright violation of format shifting. I don't believe anyone has ever been prosecuted for purely personal use. It's the sharers and uploaders they go after and occasionally downloaders, if bulk. Illegal consumption of cable TV, Satellite Pay TV and streaming is criminal theft of service. But they go after copyright violation on that, which is nothing to do with format shifting, but stealing a subscription service. Governments get fines on Criminal convictions and upper limits. The injured party gets compensation related to damages in a civil case.
So almost all copyright prosecutions are civil cases. No-one is at risk converting / shifting what they paid for if they never share it. This case would have no impact on bought media copyright fair use.
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Fair use is tricky in the US, you never know how a judge is going to rule. As I pointed out, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling on the case. Yea, Google lied about copying code, but Sun's original view was much like Bell Lab's original view of C. Oracle really likes to push the envelop on trying to extract every dime that they can.
Don't under estimate the power of high profile cases to influence companies. One area to consider is the availability of tools for an individual to exercise format shifting.