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In Reply to: Re: Copyright posted by Joseph on August 20, 2002 at 17:15:20:
I can give you a little excerpt from a working paper on the subject including an opinion from the Supreme Court. I'm sorry not to be more explicit but I don't want to serve as a free consultant to the family, who would be reading these posts.
FAIR USE IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE:SERVING THE PUBLIC INTEREST
The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.
-- Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 US 340, 349(1991)
The fair use provision of the Copyright Act allows reproduction and other uses of copyrighted works under certain conditions for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching(including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research. Additional provisions of the law allow uses specifically permitted by Congress to further educational and library activities. The preservation and continuation of these balanced rights in an electronic environment as well as in traditional formats are essential to the free flow of information and to the development of an information infrastructure that serves the public interest.
It follows that the benefits of the new technologies should flow to the public as well as to copyright proprietors.
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Without infringing copyright, the public has a right to expect:
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* to experiment with variations of copyrighted material for fair use purposes, while preserving the integrity of the original;
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* to avoid liability, after posting appropriate copyright notices, for the unsupervised actions of their users.
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Users, libraries, and educational institutions have a right to expect:
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* that rights of use for nonprofit education apply in face-to-face teaching and in transmittal or broadcast to remote locations where educational institutions of the future must increasingly reach their students.
