Linus on copyright and "fair use"

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/475654/focus=476049

by vinutheraj • 17 years ago

95 17 17 years ago

thread.gmane.org

heresy• 17 years ago

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

gvb• 17 years ago

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

Pretty old news.

bumblebird2• 17 years ago

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.

htsh• 17 years ago

Agreed. Also, nothing he criticizes here has changed since he wrote this.

ramidarigaz• 17 years ago

Crap. I accidentally down-voted you. Somebody give him an upvote for me?

My apologies, I agree with you.

selven2• 17 years ago

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.

ZeroGravitas2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

ZeroGravitas2• 17 years ago

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".

niczar• 17 years ago

2006

Linus on copyright and "fair use"

Related Stories