My e-mail was friendly and and attempt to help people avoid getting into
trouble.
Yours (Tentochi's) drips with sarcasm and self-righteousness.
Obviously the MOTM system attracts such a wide range of users--assholes,
nice people, and everyone in between!
Copyright law attempts to balance many competing rights: the right of an
artist or originator to exploit her/his work; the right of a business to
receive a return on its investment (EM presumably paid Robert Rich for the
article, fees for the web site, and publishing costs for the magazine), and
general public interest in having access to these creations (which in this
case was already freely available on a publicly accessible web site without
your republication).
Various factors are assessed when courts look at fair use cases. One point
in your favor is that you were not attempting any commercial gain yourself
by redistributing this copyrighted material. On the other hand, you copied
the entire article--not an excerpt--and that's often not considered fair
use. Finally, republishing the copyrighted work in this forum definitely
effects the potential market (newsstand sales, eyeballs on banner ads on the
site) for the article.
Fair use for educational purposes (which you reference directly) usually
consists of excerpts in an educational context; you provided no context and
definitely no ∗educational∗ context.
Sorry if I've misunderstood you. Please send me the relevant information on
how it's perfectly legal and not at all in violation of any copyright (e.g.
© 2001, IndustryClick Corp., a PRIMEDIA company. All rights reserved. This
article is protected by United States copyright and other intellectual
property laws and may not be reproduced, rewritten, distributed,
redisseminated, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast, directly or
indirectly, in any medium without the prior written permission of
IndustryClick Corp.) to (literally) copy a copyrighted work such as this in
toto and disseminate it in a public forum (not just for your personal use,
which would be perfectly fine by my estimation).
There are negative aspects to becoming embroiled in copyright violation
situations regardless of the courts. Just ask all the Harry Potter or The
Simpsons fans about the constant harrassment some of them have been
subjected to; and if one were brought to court to defend oneself, there are
legal fees that are potentially beyond the reach of many people. My post was
a friendly attempt to warn against this; I'm sure you can imagine that large
corporations have made the lives of fans and enthusiasts (whether of MOTM,
The Simpsons, etc.) very difficult for relatively insignificant reasons in
terms of potential market damage.
Of course, Yahoo! also prohibits posting copyrighted materials without the
copyright owners' permission, and this forum is a free service provided by
them.
All that aside, I thought the article was really neat! Obviously it's not
new news for most of us on the list, but the photos were cool, and it was
nice to read someone else's descriptions of modules I use every day. Thanks
Robert for taking the care to write it so clearly.
Take care all,
David.
PS--I will not be entering into any sort of dialogue concerning copyright
issues or anything related to this post. Sorry.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tentochi [mailto:tentochi@...]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 11:32 PM
> To: motm@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RE: [motm] The MOTM EM Article -- a gripe!
>
>
> I am glad you have never photocopied copyrighted material,
> never made an
> illegal cassette copy of an LP or CD and never used Napster.
> You are a
> better man than I am.
>
> Actually my distribution falls within fair use for
> educational purposes.
> This is fairly well documented in most any first year law
> textbook if you
> want to do some more research.
>
> And now to the point at hand, the Product Summary blurb was
> not visible to
> me on the website. Nor were any samples that were
> referenced. Thanks for
> passing along the rest of the info! Where did you find it?
>
> --Shemp
>
>
> > From: jwbarlow@... [mailto:jwbarlow@...]
> > Now the gripe! What brother Shemp omitted from his recent
> > copyright violating
> > e-mail is the "Product Summary" blurb, which states (on a
> scale of one to
> > five):
>
>
>
>
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