"Pics or it didn't happen."

As I recall in Max Headroom it was illegal to turn off your television. Some people got a bit of respite by throwing a blanket over their set. This was to ensure you kept watching, it didn't have anything to do with the system's surveillance capabilities, whose only obvious manifestation I think was that Max could see and hear through any monitor. Of course in the quaint world of twenty minutes into the future, the set had to be on. Now, we know that that's just silly.

I would also like to know this, because the word "spiderface" is awesome.

And my mod points expired yesterday!

The big problem is, you can do all your due diligence and claim Fair Use in your usage of copyrighted material, but Fair Use doesn't actually exist until someone sues you for infringement and loses because a judge agrees with you. If you cannot defend yourself in court, you only have Fair Use until you lose an infringement suit.

Copy machines in libraries tend to be out of sight of the librarian's station. This is so the librarian can't see if you're violating someone's copyright by copying entire works rather than a few fair-use pages. There will probably be a warning against copyright infringement posted on or near the machine itself. This way, the liability is yours as the copier, and not the librarian's/library's, as the "facilitator" of the copying. A lame solution to a lame problem, but the alternative is no copiers, which would lead to an unending stream of complaints that there are no copiers.

Copyright in the US starts at the moment of creation. I don't know if this is further defined anywhere. At the very least it means when a work is first completed. Publication is irrelevant.

And today is the day my mod points expire :p XD

Also known as the Batman exception.

If the cops in NJ were all high, things would be a lot more relaxed on the turnpike.

Cheney picked himself.

Where are my mod points when I really need them? :D

Nylon is called NYlon because it was debuted at the N.Y. World's Fair.

ReplayTV DVRs had a pretty good auto-commercial-skip function for a time. They were sued. They eliminated the function. No DVR company is going to implement such a function in the future.

Fair use doesn't apply here. If a band plays a cover song live, the venue is responsible for having paid a license fee to ASCAP or BMI or whomever. If the band records and distributes recordings of a cover song, they are responsible for paying a license fee, usually to the Harry Fox Agency which almost exclusively handles publishing royalties for cover recordings. The band doesn't get sued because it's in the songwriter's financial interests to have as many different people as possible play and record the song, because he or she gets a cut each time. At least that's how it's supposed to work.