Proposed changes to Fair Use in copyright law

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

There's something wrong with, "you can't know whether or not you've broken the law until after someone sues you or the state prosecutes you."

Sounds like a pretty good deal if you're a member of a certain industry with a lot of legal influence that happens to despise the idea of fair use.

Of course, not matter how fuzzy you try to make it there's still wiggle room, so you get a second law (DMCA) written which makes it impossible for consumers to even attempt fair use.

Problem solved.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

That's exactly how the people who wrote the law wanted it.

I don't think that's true. At least, I don't think they intended it to be "pointless." I think that, when it was written, copyright infringement was a rarely-used aspect of commercial law, and defining it for things other than "Publisher B made copies of Publisher A's bestseller" was deliberately left fuzzy to allow for individual case circumstances.

I think that, had they realized that at some point, more than 50% of all business communications would directly connect to copyright law ('cos hey! Just by reading this, you're making more than a dozen copies of it on various servers!), they'd've defined "fair use" a bit more precisely.

In the proposed changes, "non-consumptive copies" should include "makes copies on various servers in order to get it to readers."

[llreader]

With all this talk about RAM, and such, have their been serious legal cases based around the transmission of copyrighted material on servers, in RAM, etc.? It seems that something similar was always an issue, for radio transmissions of music, etc. Is this an issue of serious concern these days?