An artist creates a painting which says something import about society. The painting contains copyrighted characters. Thus, the artist gets hauled into court. Now, this might create more publicity for the painting, but the artist can’t afford the court fees.
I didn’t find that netlibrary or similar services (my college had access to at least two online libraries) was very useful for academic books. It did have some interesting books, such as a large selection of Complete Idiot’s Guide to … books (similar to …for Dummies). For some reason, the services were set up like real libraries – the online library had a certain number of ‘copies’ in its collection, and you had to ‘borrow’ a copy for a time. It was possible that all the ‘copies’ could be ‘out’, in which case you had to wait for someone to ‘return’ their copy. I guess this had something to do with copyright restrictions.
Currently, I don’t think any online library would have a better selection of political science books than a typical university library (at least one in North America). Also, it can be difficult to read a book online. One of the services used a proprietary reader that permitted you to view only one page at a time, and you had to wait for each page to load before reading it.
I see. First of all, that has absolutely no relevance to this thread, which is about putting books online for research puposes.
Second, what you describe is trademark infringement, not copyright.
Third, what you describe is allowed under the dispensation for parody and satire.
Fourth, the artist himself benefits from the copyright protection. When someone takes his image and puts it on a t-shirt for sale, is he going to be happy with it? More likely, he’ll want either them to stop or to compensate him. Well, you can’t have that right for him and not others.
Fifth, he can’t be much of an artist if he has to steal his images. If he can’t say something important without stealing, I doubt he’s saying anything important. As others have put it, all an artist has to sell is originality, and if he can’t say something in an original manner, he’s not much of an artist.
Sixth, by allowing artists to make money by controlling the ability to copy their work, it allows more people to become artists and create more work. The societal benefit of that is certainly more than the convenience of being able to rip off an image simply because you’re not good enough an artist to make your point without it.
The stated reason behind copyright is to protect the originator and to encourage the dissemination of original works of arts for a protected period of time, a frankly economic incentive. This is simply factual.
What is not factual is the way that every GQ thread on copyright goes beyond facts to become platforms for the whining teenagers complaining about their curtailed ability to steal. Those are opinions. There are several other forums where those opinions are acceptable, even if wrong.
Scott_plaid has contributed nothing to this thread that is even remotely factually correct. I am calling him on that, just as I would anyone else.
That copyright law, like all law, is subject to abuse, is meaninglessly true. If Derleth can show me that copyright owners have systematically abused the law, I’d be interested in seeing your evidence.
True. It is relivant to what you said on this thread, however. Remember when Derleth said copyright law is subject to abuse? You asked
And I responded to your question.
True, I suppose. It would be copyright infringement if it integrated sound or video, but my example doesn’t
No. It has to mock the subject to be satire. It is possible to point out how mass media effect society without it being mocking.
Do I need to remind you of the Mark Twain quote? The below address have good artist who do exactly that, steal. While the painting simply violate trademark law, the video biased projects and the audio definitely violate copyright.
http://pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/play.html
http://www.illegal-art.org/print/index.html
I posted a relevent fact in post 15. I understand that celebrating when I am told I am right is not wanted here, but that does not mean you have to be a :wally about it.
No, as Chuck already corrected you, copying for personal use can fall under Fair Use laws as long as entire works are not copied.
I’ll also point out that you don’t understand case law on parody if you think that “It has to mock the subject to be satire.”
The operative word being can, not does.
I found my definition at http://www.publaw.com/parody.html
How do you define parody? It sounds a lot different from mine.
If you had read the entire page, you would have seen that it doesn’t back you up in any way.
Nothing in that case says or implies that the 2 Live Crew song “mocked” the original. Criticism is not mocking; commenting is not mocking; mimicking is not mocking; providing social benefit is not mocking; shedding light is not mocking.
That was an important case. So important, in fact, that you ought to read it.
Criticism is not mocking?
Mocking \Mock"ing, a.
Imitating, esp. in derision, or so as to cause derision;
mimicking; derisive.
http://dict.die.net/mocking/
Exapno Mapcase, if you want copyright holders abusing their power you need look no further than the DMCA and the hash that’s made of fair use in this country. Professor Edward Felten has been threatened by the music industry. Russian citizen Dmitry Sklyarov was actually arrested for allegedly violating the DMCA. And due to the DMCA, it’s illegal to play DVDs you bought on computers you own unless the computer happens to be capable of running specific software not available for all OSes. (That prohibition does nothing to prevent illegal copying of DVDs, of course, and nobody who understands the technology on either side claims it does. It merely prevents playing, which is fair use by anyone’s standards.)
So yes, I’d say there’s been a systematic abuse of the copyright laws in this country.
Let’s tone down the hysteria a bit.
Edward Felten was sent a lawyer’s letter. Nothing further ever happened. He wasn’t sued or stopped from publishing.
Dmitry Sklyarov’s arrest was an obvious mistake. Charges were later dropped.
Jon Lech Johansen was acquitted of all charges.
P.S. Criticism is the not the same as mocking.
My regular brick-and-mortar public library has a free online library as well. It’s a web-based system where only one person can look at an e-book at any time.
Ask your local library if they have something similar, or find its web page.
Hey, you’re getting in the way of the hijack with your factual answers!
My university’s library has access to NetLibrary. In fact, i was using it today to browse through a book on SQL.
We also have access to History E-Book, a project sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies to put a whole bunch of excellent scholarly historical works online. Some of these books are leading works in their field, and many of them were pubished only in the last few years. I assume some agreement has been reached with the publishers.
Somene’s already mentioned Project Gutenberg, which has electronic copies of thousands of older books. The OP mentioned political science; well, you’ll find plenty of classic political and political economy texts on this website. I recently downloaded a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I have an actual copy of the book, but having the text is great for those occasions when i want to search for some specific reference and i can’t remember exactly where it is in the book.
There are actually also a whole bunch of other projects devoted to providing electronic copies of out-of-copyright and still-copyrighted works. Many of these are subscription-only services that are used mostly by academic libraries.
There’s Early English Books Online, which has about 100,000 books and pamphlets published in English between 1475 and 1700.
This is complemented by Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collection.
There’s also Past Masters, a full-text database of a whole bunch of classic works in the humanities.
And there are also multiple full-text databases offering fully-searchable access to historical newspapers and magazines, as well as to more recent scholarly journals. In the latter category, there is JStor, which gives access to well over a huundred scholarly journals, including the many of the biggest journals in fields such as history, political science, sociology, literature, economics, etc., etc. And my own university’s Project Muse, which offers over 250 journals in a multitude of humanities and social science fields.
As i said, these are all subscription services, so you can probably only get access to them from a subscribing library, or by taking out a personal subscription, which can sometimes be expensive. But the ability to search full-text databases is definitely making research easier. And i haven’t even touched on all the stuff available in the hard sciences, engineering, medicine, and law.
One of the hottest topics in Scientific Publishing today is so called open access publishing. With open access, authors retain copyright and control over their intellectual content, which is made readily and (often) immediately available to other researchers for purposes of education and research on the Internet. There are many questions surrounding its impact on scholarly publishing, research, and promotion and tenure.
Something like it is inevitably coming to what was once the traditional scientific journal (and really is already here to some degree).
Here is an article some on the controversy.
hysteria, nothing. Those are still good examples of abuse.
P.S. I should have said, “making fun of,” not the stronger term, “mocking”
Sigh. Scott, you can say anything you want because if you’re wrong that’s just continuing your streak. But no lawyer could argue anything like that in court, because the legal language doesn’t use those terms in the way that you keep wrongly applying.
**Sigh! ** Fine, I’m not a lawyer, and my understanding of the articles I did read, gave me a false impression. However, do you disagree that there has been abuse of the application of copyright law?
P.S. Never mind the “systematic abuse” part, abuse, period.
Abuse is meaningless. Every law ever written can be abused and has been at some time.
People make mistakes. People get overzealous. People misinterpret intent. There can be horrendous problems on the receiving end, even if a case is groundless and eventually dropped.
I’d love it if the system and the humanity running it were perfect. They’re not. That said, I see no signs of systemic or systematic abuse of the copyright laws.
This is getting into GD territory, which I’m sure we’ve beaten down and discused to death before. But for my own edification, will those that uphold the current copyrite laws perhaps admit that the fairly recent extension of copyrite to it’s current lenght (life of author = 70 years, or 120 for ‘made for hire’) was motivate by a few very large companies that strive to maintain control over something so they can milk it as long as possible? As you mentioned, many works before 1924 are available, but how many since then? If a reasonable limit isn’t placed, soon nothing made since that time will ever be released into the public domain.