Posted on 09/05/2007 6:45:19 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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Kidding. Or daydreaming. But this is important. The Computer & Communications Industry Association has filed a Complaint [PDF] -- "Matter of Misrepresentation of Consumer Fair Use and Related Rights" -- charging content owners including Universal, NBC Universal, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, Dreamworks Studios, and others, with misrepresenting copyright law in their "copyright warnings".
It's about time somebody noticed US Copyright Law includes fair use. Everyone in the entertainment industry that waxes poetic about the most holiness of copyright law seems to forget that the law includes a section limiting exclusive rights, the fair use provision. Yoo hoo. DRM fans. You probably want to pay attention.
In honor of this occasion, I'll mention that I've just put a Fair Use section on Groklaw's permanent Legal Research page in the Terms & Concepts section, so you can find resources explaining what fair use is, starting with the law itself. The finest explanation I've ever seen is the very funny comic book Bound by Law, by three law professors, James Boyle, Keith Aoki, and Jennifer Jenkins, explaining copyright law, including fair use. It's fun, but it's also accurate and quite serious about making the law clear to nonlawyers.
So, an historic moment. In fact, speaking of beaches, this is what it looks like when the legal tide begins to turn.
(Excerpt) Read more at groklaw.net ...
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Good, that one has always irked me its particularly bad when they say you cant give an account of the game without their express permission...
Thank you.
From comments in the link.
Those comments are prefaced with the speculation that Microshaft might remove the DRM code from the VISTA operating system. That's impossible.
The "protected content code" is woven so much so into all the code, it would amount to rewriting VISTA. Not happening.
Microshaft shot themselves in both feet, both arms, the brain and the heart. Recovery is therefore "iffy".
The clearly obvious, to me (I confess to being coding ignorant, but not stupid), is that Microshaft should have coded VISTA without the stupid crippling "feature", for those who had no interest whatsoever for content that "needed to be "protected", and sold it for a modestly higher price.
Then add the crippling crap to the "low price" brigade who are most likely to abuse copyright. Everybody wins.
Nope. People who were willing, indeed eager to forego media players and similar whistles entirely, the vast majority, I think, simply were flipped the bird.
Not the smartest long-term business model.
Just saying.
I have always “heard” the disclaimer to mean that the announcer’s audio cannot be used without consent of the league. I also always thought it applied to commercial use.
Did I miss something?
If you read the warning it says any use of anything, including descriptions of the game -- don't even talk about it at the water cooler. But even going the way you thought, it would mean if the announcer made a gaffe a commercial news organization couldn't use that small clip in a news story about it -- which would be fair use.
The principle here is that copyright is not an "I create it, I own it, I control it" thing, but a a set of limited rights granted to you in order to encourage you to produce more for the benefit of the people. These rights holders seem to think the former is true, and their warnings reflect that.
Like you said, it's so ingrained into the heart of Vista. They'd essentially be selling a different OS.
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