Lawmaker Revs Up Fair-Use Crusade

peipas writes "Wired News has posted an interview with Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA). In it he defends his stance in support of fair use and against the DMCA and other measures sought by the entertainment industry. The interview also touches on universal broadband and the recent overturning of the broadcast flag."

Re:Priorities

[jandrese]

There's a little saying I like to pull out in times like this:

"You gotta do what you can with what you got."

It is as true as it is ungrammatical.

Re:Priorities

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

So let media companies continue to abuse the American people and act as a de facto police force in order to expand the role of government in our lives? Funny - I want the government to protect me when large organizations are overstepping their authority. You respond by claiming the government shouldn't waste their time protecting the people but should instead expand their authority?

Wow, refreshing to see a politician...

[whoppers]

that isn't a puppet with the industry lobbyists hands jammed up his ass. Imagine what a world we'd be in if politicians used common sense and did what's right?

Boucher is not our hero...

[kajoob]

This is the guy that wants to trade the broadcast flag for our fair use rights [com.com]. Our representatives shouldn't be trading one set of our rights in order to keep a right we already have. Fair use means nothing if everything is controlled with a broadcast flag and there is nothing for us to share.

Re:Priorities

[Nagatzhul]

Cause Universal Health care sucks rocks?

Re:Boucher is not our hero...

[Feynman]

I was struck by this, too.

Frankly, so what if "high-value television programming delivered over the air...[is] going to get recorded and uploaded to the internet" [TFA, 4]. It was delivered over the air. Couldn't just about anybody have recorded it anyway?

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this a troll?
Universal Healthcare does suck.

If people are to stupid too buy medical insurance but buy spinners for their car then I shouldn't be force to pay for insurance for them.

Re:Boucher is not our hero...

[Richard_at_work]

You do realise that 'Fair Use' rarely if ever extends to sharing copyrighted material that you dont own copyright to? It actually amuses me the extent Fair Use is misunderstood on slashdot and taken to mean 'Do anything we want with it'. Let me comment based on Copyright.gov [copyright.gov] guidelines:

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered "fair," such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

Sharing your captured broadcast material over the internet, whether with friends or not, cannot be considered 'criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research' without drastic modification from the current method of how that material is shared.

Further more, the same site has the following to say on court approved uses of Fair Use:

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use:

"quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported."

So basically, unless its incidental or judicial in some fashion, Fair Use has generally been found to be not applicable to the entire item, only excerpts or quotations, and rarely the whole content. Again, this does not fit sharing your captured material over the Internet.

Re:Who's on our side?

[Znork]

With the damage that intellectual monopoly rights cause to the economy, consumers and taxpayers it shouldnt be too hard to recruit supporters provided one uses the correct arguments.

Remember, intellectual monopoly rights are, in fact, monopoly rights and nothing else. They cause the same economic damage by diverting economic resources into inefficient organizations as any other monopolies.

Organizations that can fail to make a profit on a product that costs $10k to produce and will sell a million copies at $15 a pop shouldnt exist in a free market economy.

Re:Lossed vs. Spent

[Strawser]

> Well, according to their math, every copy pirated is a sale lost, so they've "lost" trillions of dollars.

Yes, and that's silly. They make the assumption that increases in price don't affect demand. Then again, when you're talking about monopolies, they tend to think that way.

If the cost of the average CD went from $0.00 over a P2P network to $20.00 at the local mall, I wouldnt' buy the average CD. They don't seem to grasp the concept that demand and price have a generally inverse relationship.

Re:A reversal in the Democratic and Republican rol

[PrimeNumber]

Traditionally this sort of thing would have been done by a true (ie. not neoconservative) conservative Republican, fighting for the individual rights of the American citizenry.

I call BS.

Not since the 19th century has the republican party given hardly any thought to the individual rights or welfare of citizens.
I sure as hell dont remember hearing about the republican party being particularly active protecting civil rights of disenfranchised minorities during the sixties.

More accurately, Bouchers actions represent the type of actions that gave the Democratic party a reputation of being the champion of the 'little guy' in the first place.

Its too sad he is the exception rather than the rule, IMHO both the Republican and Democratice parties are essentially corporate whores these days.

Re:Boucher is not our hero...

[Richard_at_work]

No I didn't realize that, but that may be because Fair Use rights only come into play when you don't own the copyright!! Fair Use is when you use a copyrighted work without having to ask permission from the copyright owner.

My comment on sharing copyrighted worked was directed straight at the parent comment. Fair Use is a set of exclusions from standard copyright law that the copyright owner has no control over - the parents example of sharing would struggle to come under any of the examples given of accepted fair use and based on the factors given in copyright law, it would have a hard time winning a court case based on it.

You can cite statutes all you want, but unless you know the case law behind it, you don't know what it has been interpreted to mean. For instance, did you know that the Supreme Court has held that "any individual may reproduce a copyrighted work for a 'fair use;' the copyright owner does not possess the exclusive right to such a use." SONY CORP. OF AMER. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC., 464 US 417 (1984).? I can tell that you didn't.

I dont see any mention of redistribution of the reproduction being allowed under that ruling and fair use certainly doesnt give you the sort of redistribution rights that slashdotters seem to think. I did know about that ruling tho.

Did you even read what you cited? That is a list of "EXAMPLES", and the list is not exclusive.

I did read that, tahnkyou. That is a list of EXAMPLES that courts have found to be fair use. Note the distinct lack in that short list of examples where the item has been redistributed in entirety, but I do agree that its a non exhaustive list.

Again, if you did any research you'd find that there is no exhaustive list for "fair uses" nor is there any bright line test for what constitutes fair use.

Equally that can also mean that theres no exhaustive uses against fair use - as each case of fair use is decided upon its own merits, this will always be the case. You cant look at a usage and immediately claim its fair use or not, but based on past cases, predominently the thing which has been found to be Fair Use is partial reproduction, not full reproduction and distribution.

The factor that has the most weight to ascertain whether or not a use is a fair use is "was it for commercial purposes?". That's the biggy, so if you're using it for personal use (does that include sharing? we don't know yet) then it is more likely that your use is non-infringing, but even that is not dispositive

No, there are four (4) weights attached when deciding if a use is fair or not and these are laid out in section 107:

1. Commercial or non commercial

2. Nature of copyrighted work

3. Size and substantiality of portion used

4. The effect of reproduction on the marketability or value of the work

The section places NO WEIGHT on any single one of those, each is as equal when determining whether the usage is fair use or not. The fiar usage exclusions within copyright law all use language which leans toward partial redistribution and now redistribution of the entire work.

OK, you just contradicted yourself. You said previously that you can't copy an entire work without infringing, but now you say that Fair Use has only been generally (read: not entirely) applicable to copies of whole works

No you misread my sentance, I say that Fair Use has generally found to be not applicable to entire works except under certain exceptions such as incidental copying or judicial copying.

To reply to your final point, I never ever said in my post that an action such as sharing is 'an abolute infringing act', my wording was very carefully put across to ensure that all I said was that it didnt certainly and definately fall under Fair Use like most slashdotters seem to believe it does. You have no immediate right to redistribute copyrighted material anyway you like, and that is the belief most slashdotters seem to think they have a right to.

Distraction tactics

[russotto]

Boucher is the free-speech side's token politician. He never actually manages to get anything through committee, and certainly never gets it passed, and he never actually intends to.

Rather, he's there to maintain the fiction of balance, and the hope of possibility of change for the better through the established political process. By doing so, he siphons off efforts which would be better put towards forcing change through other means, AND provides an excuse for fans of the system to tell those who are violating the laws to just simmer down and work through the political process.

Remember, he voted for the DMCA.

DRM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any hope he'll also campaign more against TCPA & other DRM (Digital Restrictions Management)[1]?

[1] Maybe the industry sees those as "rights" but all I get on my end are restrictions. I suggest that others use that expansion of the acronym, too. I mean, no one can agree on what URL means any more after this (Universal? Uniform? Doesn't matter which one was right; the fact that too few know which is which is enough...)

Re:Lossed vs. Spent

[Foobar of Borg]

Yeah, no kidding. One thing they also don't get is that, P2P or no P2P, if a CD is $20, I simply won't buy it, and neither will a lot of other people. Entertainment is something we can do without if the price is too high. It would have to be an extremely good CD for me to go out and pay $20 for it. If the price were much higher, it could be the most sublime music in the world and I wouldn't buy it.

I actually don't mind at all paying a reasonable price for a CD or a movie. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to have been duped into thinking and acting as though cable/satellite TV, CDs, movies and such are all absolutely essential for their existence.

The same old BS

[Anita Coney]

Rick Boucher seems pretty smart about the issues until the very end, when he repeats the same industry bullshit lie, namely that "the only way that I think we are going to have high-value television programming delivered over the air in digital format is if the motion picture industry has some level of confidence that it's not going to get recorded and uploaded to the internet."

That is PURE bullshit for one simple reason: Broadcasters ARE currently delivering "high-value" content in HD format "over the air"!!!! You can't say that broadcasters won't do something unless we take action, WHEN THEY ARE FUCKING DOING IT RIGHT NOW!!!

That bullshit lie is just a ploy to get broadcast flags in place to make sure we have absolutely no fair use rights left.

Re:A reversal in the Democratic and Republican rol

[snullbug]

Throwing your own cup of water into the passing flood hardly counts as "being particularly active". Neither does jumping on a bandwagon whose time has come.

Re:A reversal in the Democratic and Republican rol

[Enry]

Yea, and the Democrats that voted against said bills switched parties. Remember the Dixiecrats?

Defending Fair Use

[Nom du Keyboard]

To defend Fair Use, you have to defend concept of the Public Domain.

To defend the concept of the Public Domain, you have to be against insane copyright extensions.

To be against insane copyright extensions you have to not take money and favors from those seeking to kill the Public Domain through insane copyright extensions.

What did you say your job was again, Sir?

Re:So would you trade?

[Hamfist]

Reasonably speaking, yes. The Digital Media Consumers Rights Act allows me to remove the broadcast flag for fair use.

Re:think so?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, what do you think most social programs revolve around?

Stealing one person's money, and giving it to someone else who didn't do anything to earn it?

Re:A reversal in the Democratic and Republican rol

[orgelspieler]

I don't think that's a fair statement to make, though I sorta wish it were true. It implies that "traditional" Democrats don't/didn't fight for individual's rights. I think that most political parties have had their shining moments and great leaders. They also have their turkeys, who think that protecting rights involves things like PATRIOT act and arresting people for taking pictures of bridges. I'm just glad that *any* politician has the guts to stand up for what he believes is right. I wish there were more of them.

Re:Lossed vs. Spent

[SirSlud]

For what its worth, a wide release movie has already made money (well, most) by the time the DVD comes out.

The CD has to pay back for the entire cost of the production, since the revenues earned on tour dont go to the studio.

I still think its retarded tho. What the actual musicians make from the cost of that CD is tiny, and the money used to make the CDs is actually in the form of a loan the artist.