To Ralph and Elf, the reason I specified "for profit, or deprivation of potential profit," is because that is exactly where the line gets drawn regarding fair use. For example:
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
1) Educational--teachers are permitted to, for example, make 40 copies of a poem to hand out to the class, instead insisting that each student buy a book for that one poem.
2) Personal use--I'm not required to buy a digital copy of a book I own physically, and have scanned & converted myself in order to avoid buying the DRM'd version. (I don't have any of these. Yet. But I'm considering starting a collection; the used paperback version is often cheaper than the ebook version, and I don't mind scanning, OCR'ing and formatting books. I've done this for a few books that don't have commercial ebook versions available; is that depriving the author of potential profit? Certainly I don't intend to buy an ebook version if one becomes available.)
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In both of these cases, profit is not involved. If you sold copies, profit would be involved... that violates fair use and copyright law. Here, the question becomes whether you deprive the creator of potential profit... as I said, that's a question that needs to be answered to satisfy fair use.
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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
And the long precedents of "Fair Use"? You seemed to have forgotten them....
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No, I haven't (as explained above). However, because the physical nature and practical considerations of e-books and printed books are so different, you have to consider that some precedents are not going to apply to the new medium, and some of those might include some parts of "fair use" that are common to paper books today. It'll mean getting used to doing some things differently, in some cases, whether we like it or not... much as we got used to the cost and trouble of wiring our homes for phones, or cable, when those technologies came out, and accepting that you couldn't just put your phone or TV anywhere... it had to be near an outlet. Or getting used to the new traffic laws that went hand-in-hand with the development of the automobile.
I expect some aspects of "fair use" to change over time, although I'm not sure which aspects.