It can. That's not to say it always does, or even commonly does. But any sort of use can be a fair use, including fanfic.

It could be. But fair use hinges entirely on the specific facts of the use -- it would take the right example.

They can be, but there are limits. The key is how well-defined the character is. Also, bear in mind that really the character is not protected by copyright per se -- the character is just a part of a greater work, which is protected by copyright. Whenever a work which establishes some trait of a character falls into the public domain, so too does that part of the character. Unauthorized uses of the character are really unauthorized uses of the work, which is what can give rise to infringement. A character cannot be copyrighted separately from the work in which he appears, however.

Or to the extent that the work is not protected, either because it is in the public domain, or because some exception to copyright law applies.

Clarity; To avoid paying greater fees for litigation down the road, even if they were confident that they would win; As a favor wrapped in a plausible excuse; For good PR. There are good reasons to do so, is the point.

No it doesn't. Copyright law in the US states that if a copyright is prima facie infringed, but constitutes fair use, then there is no infringement. Parodies and satires -- and for that matter, literally any other sort of use -- can potentially be fair uses, but are not necessarily fair uses. Certainly there have been both parodies and satires which were not fair uses.

It can easily be seen as a satire. Whether it's a parody is a slightly more difficult question. The legal distinction, for those unfamiliar with this, is that a parody somehow makes fun of the work being used; a satire makes fun of something else, but uses the work to do so. Making fun of the trend of 'gritty reboots' in cinema by using the Power Rangers is certainly satire -- it makes fun of other gritty reboot films and shows. I'd have to have seen it, and know something about the regular Power Rangers to have an opinion as to whether it's a parody, and I frankly don't care enough to bother.

The question of whether the filmmakers meant it as a satire at the time that they made it and released it, and whether that matters, is certainly an interesting one. I can't think of caselaw that indicates that the timing matters or not, but please feel free to cite some.

This is an incorrect view of fair use.

Fair use applies to any sort of use of a copyrighted work, which but for fair use would be infringing, and which is fair. I know this sounds like a tautology, but there it is. There is a four-factor test as to whether a use is fair or not, which we'll get into shortly. That's really what matters. True, there is a list of examples in the statute, but it's really meaningless: It's not an exhaustive list of all types of fair use, and the types of uses listed are not necessarily fair. While it was meant to provide guidance, the list of uses has turned out to only cause serious confusion. I strongly encourage you to ignore it completely.

For those reading along, the four factor test is:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The key thing to bear in mind is that the test is not to be applied in a strictly mathematical way; it's really just a tool to provide guidance for the ultimate question of: Is the use fair?

Fair uses have been found when most of the factors weigh against it. And the four factors are not the only factors worth considering; courts must consider them, but can also consider additional factors if they like, with no rules as to what those factors are.

In any case, you're looking at the 'amount and substantiality of the portion used' in too mechanical a fashion. Remember, the copyright for a character is really all about the details that go into describing the character. What does he look like? What clothes does he wear? What sort of method of speaking does he have? What kinds of behavior are typical for him? And so forth.

For example, if the character in question were Harry Potter, the character would be used less if, for instance, his scar did not appear, or there were no mention of his crappy home life. Those aren't the only traits that define the character, obviously, but the fewer you use, the more likely it is that you're engaged in fair use. (New traits made up by the user, which do not appear in the original work don't matter, btw; so if you add fluency in Magical Esperanto, it doesn't weigh against fair use, since it never arises in Rowling's books or in the movies)

Again, I haven't seen anything involving Power Rangers, but if it's just that the characters are dressed in similar outfits and otherwise bear no relation to the originals, this would indicate that relatively little of the characters were used.

And of course, remember that even if 100% of a work is used, it can still be fair use, under the right circumstances. Instances of time shifting and space shifting have been found to be fair uses, and they use all of the work.

It doesn't sound absurd to me. Whether it has artistic merit has no connection to whether it's legal. The silent movie Nosferatu is a classic but infringed on the copyright of the novel Dracula. Luckily, while the courts ordered the film destroyed, one copy survived, and we have that to thank for the preservation of the film.

There's no central registry of copyright registrations, assignments, and licenses. There probably should be, but there isn't. How would Vimeo know that the filmmakers didn't have permission? They could've gotten the rightsholder to grant them an oral or implied license, and there would be no way for Vimeo to distinguish that from them having no license at all. It's not Vimeo's job to know these things, and usually they're in no position to find out. Requiring rightsholders to search for infringements is the best way to go.

No there's not. There is no moral aspect to copyright; it's amoral and utilitarian. Though if pressed, I would say that it is more moral to create and publish works than it is to prohibit the creation and publication of works (particularly if it's just about money).

No, they fund things that have a military application, some of which are interesting. But it's not like the good old days, when they'd fund things that were interesting, regardless of military value.

If you're going to go around reading Wikipedia pages, you may as well finish reading them before citing them.

Here's what the very same Wikipedia page says, one paragraph after the one you quoted:

The ARPANET incorporated distributed computation (and frequent re-computation) of routing tables. This was a major contribution to the good survivability that the ARPANET had, in the face of significant destruction - even by a nuclear attack. Such auto-routing was technically quite challenging to construct at the time. The fact that it was incorporated into the early ARPANET made many believe that this had been a design goal.

The ARPANET was in fact designed to survive subordinate-network losses, but the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the resource scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965â"1967), said:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried.

Which agrees nicely with what I said in my earlier comment.

You then went on to say:

No, they weren't the only place with money. But ARPA was founded in 1958, and it wasn't until 1973 that they were required to only spend money on defense-related projects. Before that, they had a habit of giving money to all sorts of interesting projects. JCR Licklider, an obscure, yet tremendously important person in computing history, wanted to build computer networks and was a higher-up at ARPA in the 60's. His successor was Ivan Sutherland, who should need no introduction, and Sutherland brought in Bob Taylor, who finally got a network funded and built. Since you like Wikipedia, here's a passage from Taylor's entry:

Among the computer projects that ARPA supported was time-sharing, in which many users could work at terminals to share a single large computer. Users could work interactively instead of using punched cards or punched tape in a batch processing style. Taylor's office in the Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing at MIT, a terminal connected to the Berkeley Timesharing System at the University of California at Berkeley, and a third terminal to the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He noticed each system developed a community of users, but was isolated from the other communities.

Taylor hoped to build a computer network to connect the ARPA-sponsored projects together, if nothing else to let him communicate to all of them through one terminal.

When ARPA got out of the business of spending money on interesting work, the National Science Foundation was supposed to pick up the slack, but this never happened. While I can understand how some people might cast aspersions on projects that used military funding, even if they're not meant for military applications, the money spends well enough.

No it wasn't; that's just an urban legend. The ARPAnet was a way of allowing researchers to share resources. Thus, a user in San Francisco could use a computer in Los Angeles, and wouldn't even need a new, dedicated terminal to do it. Its resilience has more to do with the poor state of telecommunications at the time demanding it, and certain design features that allowed for a useful combination of efficiency and flexibility.

As for why it was funded by DARPA, that was where there was money.

No it didn't. Pirates have never had a technological edge over legitimate publishers. At best there's parity, but usually publishers have an edge over pirates.

If you wanted to pirate a book before the invention of movable type, you could copy it longhand -- just like you'd have to do if you wanted to make an authorized copy.

And people did this all the time. In fact, the only reason that any books (other than those written on clay, stone, or metal) survive from antiquity is because they were copied, the copies were copied, and the copies spread far and wide. Often only one copy survived long enough for more to be made. Paper of various kinds has been in use for a long time, but the oldest paper book is only about 1700 years old.

There was no exclusivity. Some places, like the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, had an official policy that all books that entered the city had to be made available for copying.

The very idea that authors should have exclusive rights in their works is only a few centuries old.

Well, all the people who published works before 1710 had no copyrights. All the people who published after that, but not in England had no copyrights until various countries slowly adopted copyright (the US picked it up in 1790, the French after that, and most of Europe in the 19th century -- and they only exported it to the rest of the world by means of colonialism, not on its own actual merits).

Plus there were various limits, e.g. the US only granted copyrights to Americans until almost the end of the 19th century; British authors had no option to get an American copyright at all... unless they became American citizens.

More recently, various classes of work were ineligible. For example, architectural works (in practice, buildings) were uncopyrightable in the US until 1990. Were no buildings designed and built in this country until architects were given copyrights?

What I think you're missing here is that there are a plethora of incentives for an author to create and publish a work. Money gained by exploiting a copyright on the work is but one of those incentives, and often is not the most important one, and also often is not an essential one.

I certainly agree that it can be useful, but that doesn't mean that we ought to go hog wild with it; as with many other things, a little might be beneficial, but too much can be harmful.

The point is to grant authors copyrights as an additional incentive in order to entice them into creating and publishing works which they would not have created and published, but for copyright. If they would've done it anyway, the copyright is superfluous, and granting it would be wasteful. If they require more copyright than is healthy for society, all things considered, we're literally better off not granting it even though it means we'll be bereft of the work in question.

It's not intended to give authors control over works for their own sake. That's just the means by which it functions. It's intended to produce a public benefit. And while the public does benefit from having works created and published, it also benefits from not having anyone controlling works.

Well, that's how it operated in the US from 1790 through to the end of 1977. Turns out that relatively few published works were copyrighted. Further, since there was a renewal term (that is, the copyright would be good for an additional number of years if you re-upped in a timely fashion) we also know that most authors of copyrighted works didn't bother to get a renewal, and let their works enter the public domain sooner than they had to.

It worked fine. We got great literature and the golden age of Hollywood on both film and tv, as well as tons of great music.

And frankly, a system of strict formalities to get copyrights is a more important thing to change in the law than shortening the term length.

Why should the rest of us aid them in doing so? E.g. by conferring upon them some sort of legal rights that pertain to how the work is used by others.

While I think it could potentially be beneficial for the public to grant rights to authors, it's surely not always beneficial under every circumstance, and every permutation of works and rights.

And if the author doesn't like the terms under which the public might deign to give them rights, they're free to not create the work.

It's really a matter of directing its creation. Mere ideas aren't copyrightable, and merely coming up with one doesn't matter. If you use someone else's idea but are the only creative participant, they won't get rights in tor work.

And if you direct creation, you don't have to be the person who literally brings it about, either. But this is more than just paying someone a commission, or giving them the basic idea. It means that the other active participant isn't contributing anything creative.

So for example, if you tell a photographer that you want a photo of some subject, the photographer will end up being the author. If you tell him exactly what camera settings to use, what lighting, choose the subject, pose the subject, etc., then you're engaging in authorship.

No, they're not. Being the author means having sole artistic control. Being a joint author would involve two parties having artistic control, and an intent to produce a joint work. And a work for hire, in which authorship is attributed to an employer requires more than merely commissioning a work. It requires actual employment, with all the relevant indicia (tax forms, insurance, providing the tools and work area, etc.) or in a handful of cases, contractual language.

You might be interested in Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony and Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid.

I think you mean Johnny Depp.

Nope!

ReDigi was a company that claimed to sell used music files, just as a used bookstore sells books. It argued that it was protected under the 17 USC 109, the first sale exception, by claiming that copying then deleting files was a transfer. (Even they were not so stupid as to believe that it's possible to transfer a file over a network without copying in the process, even if this is not apparent to the user)

The court that heard the case shut them down:

You should read the whole thing: http://www.documentcloud.org/d...

It even points out, as I have, that this is unavoidable:

It is in the US.

What does that have to do with anything? You think that legislators are never wrong?

Here are the laws that make unauthorized downloading of copyrighted works prima facie illegal in the US:

17 USC 501(a): "Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122 ... is an infringer of the copyright ... of the author."

17 USC 106: "Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights ... to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies."

17 USC 101: "'Copies' are material objects ... in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term 'copies' includes the material object ... in which the work is first fixed."

"A 'device', 'machine', or 'process' is one now known or later developed."

"A work is 'fixed' in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. A work consisting of sounds, images, or both, that are being transmitted, is 'fixed' for purposes of this title if a fixation of the work is being made simultaneously with its transmission."

If Alice has a file server on which are copyrighted works, and Bob, without permission from the copyright holder, downloads them, Bob causes his computer to fix those works in a tangible medium of expression (such as a hard drive), which creates new copies of those works. The copy is the tangible medium, again e.g. a hard drive, not the mere intangible files. By creating copies without permission, Bob has infringed on the exclusive right of the copyright holder to make new copies.

So, it's prima facie infringing.

You actually conceded this point earlier; you obliquely referred to 17 USC 117, which is an exception dealing with computer programs. Section 117 is completely unnecessary if no prima facie infringement occurs. Much in the way that you don't have to bother raising a defense to a charge of murder, like self-defense, if the supposed victim is still alive. Or if programming is more your thing, think of an if-then-else statement: if infringement occurs, then see if section 117 applies, else infringement has not occurred, so exit.

So you appear to agree that downloading is prima facie infringement, the question is simply whether the exception in 117 saves the downloader. It almost never will.

17 USC 117: "(a) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

(b) Any exact copies prepared in accordance with the provisions of this section may be leased, sold, or otherwise transferred, along with the copy from which such copies were prepared, only as part of the lease, sale, or other transfer of all rights in the program. Adaptations so prepared may be transferred only with the authorization of the copyright owner."

17 USC 101: "A 'computer program' is a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result."

This usually won't work because Bob, the downloader, almost certainly 1) isn't the owner of a copy prior to making a new copy, which is necessary in 117 to be allowed to make the new copy; 2) isn't making copies for archival purposes only; 3) most data, such as music, movies, etc. will not be treated as computer programs by courts, despite the broad language in section 101.

I mean, feel free to try it, but you have my guarantee that you'll not just lose, but be laughed at.

Okay genius, I've cited the relevant statutes for making my argument. It's time for you to put up or shut up.

Remember to cite very specifically, and to look at definitions. You may also want to look at relevant caselaw.

Digital files are just intangible information; what we'd call a work. A book, as a material object in which a work can be fixed, is no different than a hard drive. And btw, most, if not all written languages are digitial. There's no letter that's halfway in between an A and a B.

Not really.

The only significant special treatment of computer programs in the Act that might be useful here is the exception at 17 USC 117. The Act defines "computer programs" as a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result. I think it would be quite a stretch to apply that to absolutely any sort of data on a computer, as opposed to actual executables and such.

But even if we accepted that, it still isn't helpful. 117 allows the owner of a copy to make additional copies or adaptations, only if they're essential for using them, or as backups. And the backups cannot be transferred without transferring the ownership of the original, and cannot be kept in the event of a transfer.

So I don't see how it would help protect you if you decided to host mp3 files for people to download, in an infringing manner. Perhaps you'd like to explain your plan?

Well, I suppose that it's possible that you might unplug your hard drive, put it in a cardboard box, and mail it to me, in response to a download request, but that's surely too unusual to care about.

Because the law defines making copies as a form of infringement, defines copies as material objects, and because we lack the ability to send a material object through the net, you cannot transmit an original copy of a work to me online. All you can do is give me the information I need to create a new copy on my end.

It's irrelevant whether you delete the file once I've downloaded it. The Copyright Act doesn't treat a copy followed by a deletion as not being copying. It doesn't matter in the least how many copies actually exist in the end, only what the provenance of the copies is. There is an essay called 'What colour are your bits?' which you may find helpful.

It is not, in any legally meaningful way, transferred anywhere.

Please take a look at this page, which discusses the outcome of the ReDigi case, and includes a copy of the opinion. ReDigi tried to sell used music files, going through the sort of copy and delete rigamarole as you suggest. They got shut down hard because it's utter nonsense as far as the legal system is concerned.