

Linus on copyright and "fair use" - vinutheraj
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/475654/focus=476049

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ZeroGravitas
One big issue with this is that fair use is a US concept and is much more
reasonable than many other countries. The UK is fairly black and white about
copyright.

~~~
NikkiA
Actually, we do have fair-use these days, it was added to UK law in 2004:

<http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use>

But, in most ways it is less permissive than US 'fair use'. There again, most
of the US fair use rationale isn't codified per se, but based on court
interpretation and precedence, and since the UK has nowhere near the level of
precedence in that area, it's understandable.

The UK fair use policy DOES offer some slightly more permissive commercial
uses however, for example recent spates of youtube videos being pulled because
a commercial song was playing on a radio in the background would be 'fair use
due to incidental usage' under UK law.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I think you've been misled. That's an international company's website that is
using "fair use" as a catch all term for similar legal concepts. I don't think
that page is specifically talking about UK law (e.g. _"The actual specifics of
what is acceptable will be governed by national laws, and although broadly
similar, actual provision will vary from country to country."_ ) and I believe
the 2004 date is just when they updated that page.

I coincidentally just attended a briefing on copyright given by our lawyers on
Thursday and the basic message was that the exemptions are complex and
incredibly tight and have gotten much tighter recently (particularly "non-
commercial" is a shadow of its former self).

From Wikipedia:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing>

 _"Fair dealing is an enumerated set of possible defenses against an action
for infringement of an exclusive right of copyright. Unlike the related United
States doctrine of fair use, fair dealing cannot apply to any act which does
not fall within one of these categories. In practice, common law courts might
rule that actions with a commercial character, which might be naïvely assumed
to fall into one of these categories, were in fact infringements of copyright
as fair dealing is not as flexible a concept as the American concept of fair
use."_

The fact that "fair dealing" is a list of narrow exemptions in the
legislation, rather than a general concept is why we're still waiting for new
legislation that will allow us to legally rip CDs to put on our iPods while in
the US a judge can decide that it is "fair use".

------
gvb
Date: 2006-12-14 16:52:15 GMT (2 years, 48 weeks, 6 days, 19 hours and 23
minutes ago)

Pretty old news.

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bumblebird
I hadn't seen it before. I think he gets it 100% correct as well. Good to see
things like this to contrast the ridiculous fundamentalism some free software
people spout.

~~~
selven
This is a fairly serious issue in some free software places (eg. Slashdot). It
seems that copyright when used by big corporations is evil and restrictions
are good, but when the GPL gets weakened by them it's suddenly a bad thing.
Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways, sometimes in life you need to take
the bad with the good.

~~~
camccann
_It seems that copyright when used by big corporations is evil and
restrictions are good, but when the GPL gets weakened by them it's suddenly a
bad thing._

Keep in mind that the GPL is not an end in and of itself; it's a cute little
legal hack to create a self-contained domain that simulates a world without
copyright, with a one-way boundary to ensure that things stay inside that
domain (there's a fairly straightforward game theory analysis of why this
gives GPL-style licenses a competitive advantage over BSD-style licenses, but
that's getting off topic).

So, in that context, it actually makes sense to simultaneously support strict
enforcement of the GPL and oppose copyright.

Of course, most people don't think copyright is intrinsically immoral and thus
won't find the above perspective persuasive, but I'm pretty sure that's
roughly where people like RMS are coming from.

~~~
selven
That would be true if it weren't for the fact that the GPL requires
distributors to publish source code as well as license their derivatives under
the GPL. So it's not just a copyright-free zone, like Creative Commons Share
Alike is.

~~~
camccann
Requiring GPL on derivative works is the one-way boundary I mentioned; the
simulated "copyright-free zone" in question is comprised of all GPL-licensed
software, so anything existing wholly within that realm isn't impacted. The
purpose of the derivative license requirement is to discourage external
dependencies creating copyright-by-proxy inside the GPL zone.

I don't actually think the source code publishing requirement is necessary;
something like CC BY-SA would probably suffice.

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niczar
2006

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heresy
jeff merkey is still around? lol, he's an odd one

