Media giants want to end US fair use doctrine

Google’s senior copy­right coun­sel, William Patry, posted a long arti­cle about a whis­per cam­paign that media giants are con­duct­ing. Patry’s arti­cle was also dis­cussed on Boing­Bo­ing. and ArsTech­nica.

The whis­pered rumor is that US Fair Use doc­trine is so broad that it vio­lates inter­na­tional law — specif­i­cally, the Berne Con­ven­tion on copy­right. If enough national gov­ern­ments agree with this inter­pre­ta­tion, the US gov­ern­ment might be required to replace the Fair Use doc­trine with some­thing far more restric­tive and expensive.

Patry, who helped nego­ti­ate mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the Berne Con­ven­tion when he worked for the U.S. Copy­right Office, offers a lengthy and detailed response to the whis­per cam­paign that can be sum­ma­rized in one word: NO.

Why should stu­dents care?

A revo­ca­tion of fair use might also destroy the online and retail used text­book mar­kets. This would limit the oppor­tu­ni­ties to find used text­books, and force more stu­dents to buy new text­books for their courses.

Fair use is the doc­trine that lets review­ers quote from the pub­lished works, and helps pro­fes­sors dis­trib­ute sec­tions of pub­lished works to their stu­dents. With­out fair use, stu­dents and uni­ver­si­ties will have to pay more for the con­tent they cur­rently use.

The pub­lish­ing and media con­glom­er­ates would love to kill fair use once and for all in the USA, to help the indus­tries’ flag­ging revenues.

it’s unlikely that the US courts would allow the Fair Use doc­trine to be over­turned, even if the US Con­gress does man­age to over­turn it through new legislation.

The Euro­pean Union is about to vote down a publisher-friendly three strikes pro­posal that would have let ISPs exile users from the Inter­net for repeated copy­right vio­la­tions, includ­ing P2P file-sharing. See this Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion post for more details.

Related posts

For more infor­ma­tion see my posts about copy­right, includ­ing the fol­low­ing arti­cles from billso.com:

• 24 March 2008: The used elec­tronic textbook
• 21 Feb­ru­ary 2008: Copy­right and fair use
• 4 Feb­ru­ary 2008: Bet­ter than free
• 13 Novem­ber 2007: File shar­ing and cam­pus security
• 5 Octo­ber 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 17 July 2007: A quick expla­na­tion of copy­right law
• 6 Feb­ru­ary 2007: Steve Jobs calls for DRM-free music sales
• 29 Sep­tem­ber 2006: US copy­right law in verse

Tagged as: audio, copyright, EU, fair-use, Google, ISP, media, student, textbook, USA, video