[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by GlennD

Actually, all of these could be considered copyright infringement. Education is generally accepted as fair use without much question or fuss, but reviews do have to be careful of what parts of a work they reprint without permission.

Reviews often quote a few lines from the original. (I'm thinking of a book review that quotes no more than a couple of sentences.) Teachers often copy a single poem for an entire class. Both of those uses are very common, and widely held to be fair use.

I'm aware that fair use has to be decided on a case-by-case basis (and that's a potential challenge point to the whole law... part of the basic premise of law is that a person has to be able to know which actions are legal and which are not.)

The point is--there are several uses of the author's work, without permission or compensation and sometimes to their financial detriment, that are entirely legal.

A personal copy is by no means automatically 'Fair Use'. The Audio Home Recording Act specifically granted the right to make a copy of an audio recording for personal use but that doesn't apply to printed work.

There's a difference between "doesn't apply" and "has not yet been proven in court to apply."

The bottom line with Fair Use is that it's decided on a case by case basis. If a copyright holder believes that your use is infringement, he has the right to sue you. Your defense will be 'fair use' and the judge will determine if it is or not.

Fair use has been determined to be a bit stronger than that--it's been ruled that copyright owners are required to consider whether fair use applies before they file a DMCA complaint; this indicates that fair use isn't just an affirmative defense--it's a legal use that can't be challenged.

A copyright holder can, of course, believe that any particular use is not fair use. That's different from their ability to file suit when they think use is fair, but they want to stop or delay that use, and are using a lawsuit to do so. Before Lenz vs Universal ruling, copyright owners were not (necessarily) required to consider whether use was fair before filing.

Obviously, your chances of being sued by a copyright holder if you scan a book and never distribute the digital copy are slim to none. It can still be considered infringement though. As you say, semantics are important.

It might be considered infringement. I believe it is fair use, under the same principles that allow videotaping of TV shows--format shifting for personal use. If I am right, then the thousands of other people who scan personal documents are also not guilty of copyright infringement, rather than stuck in some legal limbo of "maybe they're guilty but they'll never be charged so it doesn't matter."

I did notice that the RIAA, which tried to claim that ripping one's own CDs to MP3 is "unauthorized reproduction," failed to attempt to sue anyone for that. If they believed they had any chance of conviction--if they really thought copyright law prevented such use--why didn't they go after it? It'd only take one such case to establish precedent to allow them all sorts of rights to prevent people's use of their purchased CDs.

I recommend taking a look at the wikipedia article on fair use doctrine, especially the section on common misunderstandings. Several of them are very relevant to your examples.

Unless you are arguing that it's generally NOT legal for teachers to photocopy a poem forty times, or that reviewers cannot legally quote a book when reviewing it, and that these illegal actions are just too small to prosecute, I don't need any review of the fair use aspects of copyright law.

I'm aware that, in some circumstances, these actions would not be legal. I'm not saying they're always legal. I'm saying they are often legal, and that they are common situations, not obscure, rare matters of fair use.