Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Fair Use should extend to digitizing content for others' secondary use; but "does it really do that?"
Electronic Frontier Foundation promotes this week as Copyright Week, with these goals”: Maintaining a robust public domain; “You Bought It, You Own It” (the copy – First Sale doctrine); Fair Use; and Transparency.
Corynne McSherry has an article, “Fair Use Economics:How Fair Use Makes Innovation Possible and Profitable”. She pays particular attention to concepts like Google Book Project, where digitization of books is predicated on enabling Fair Use by other people. She also links to a case “Fox v. TvEyes”, where Fox News sued a company “digitizing” its news reports for others to use.
It’s notable that Author’s Guild has opposed Google’s claims, on its worldview that some people need to make a living off their writing so they need to protect the use of it forever. Author’s Guild is interesting in that, at least in the past, it has limited membership to people who really get advances for what is publishes.