[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

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:

{teacher's copies ... personal copies}

In both of these cases, profit is not involved. If you sold copies, profit would be involved... that violates fair use and copyright law.

"Refusal to buy more copies" is not a profit motive? Technically, uploading an ebook to a torrent network doesn't involve profit, either. It's still denying potential profit to the author.

An author would certainly make more profit if every school that wanted to have children study a poem had to buy an entire book per student. (Of course, the general response would be that children in public schools would only study poems in the public domain. As this is considered an undesirable state of affairs, some use for educational purposes is allowed. However, it's still use that prevents profit, and the author doesn't give permission for it.)

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.

Yes, but it's not the only relevant question. It's balanced against other aspects, like the purpose of the (potentially fair) use, and the nature of the work itself.

Fair use isn't decided by "does/does not this use negatively affect the income of the author?"

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.

This part, I agree with.

Copyright law needs a major overhaul, because the established aspects don't apply well to digital documents, which leads to both ridiculous restrictions on personal use, and terrible losses to authors whose works are appropriated without compensation.

I expect some aspects of "fair use" to change over time, although I'm not sure which aspects.

I'd like to see the protections for educational use increased, or at least well-described, so that teachers and students understood how much is fair use. I wouldn't mind for-profit use, including reviews, parodies and transformative works, to be required to pay a simple licensing fee for amounts beyond incidental use. (This would require a lot more registration paperwork.)