The 7 words that could improve Copyright
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This sounds particularly appealing as an aspiring content creator: finally a legal standard that neither requires pursuing creators of fan fiction, fan mods, and so on, nor creates a risk of accidentally losing copyright over one's own works!
@anigbrowl: I agree that there's a potential issue with sufficiently negative use of material under the expanded fair use rules; but then again, philosophies, governments and religions aren't given legal protection from rotten eggs. A creative work, too (even the architecture of a mall), becomes part of the culture; other members of the culture have the right to react negatively as well as positively to it.
For example, just now I'm thinking about the costs of getting a release to shoot video in a private location (a shopping center). It would make my film look more interesting but hurt its budget. If I shoot by stealth (not so hard with modern cameras) they would have a copyright complaint against the film and could sue for damages. The copyright claim subsists in the interior architecture, configuration and decoration of the building.
But what if I release my film for free, just to say 'hey look at my film (and consider investing in the next one)'. The analogy would be using an allegedly proprietary algorithm in a piece of open-source code, I suppose. There's an indirect commercial gain on my part (if it proves popular), but should the IP owner have a claim on a free work?
The proposal does include a threshold of whether such a violation does harm to a business, or is likely to. Unfortunately, that puts the defendant in such a case in the position of having to prove a negative, ie that the complainant's allegations of likely harm are unreasonable. If my shopping center scene involved a successful pickpocket, they would have a good claim, but suppose they just complain that I made it look drab or old-fashioned?
I had thought there had been a recent change in law or at least that the consensus opinion on this (which I disagree with) is that the use in Mad Hot Ballroom (see links) was fair use (incidental) and didn't require rights holders consent.
My view is that if the ringtone (building in your case) is incidental then you can film without it or use a non copyright soundtrack edit (different building) and it won't matter.
It bothered me that I couldn't remember the details so I looked it up and found "copyright law"+"amy sewell" turned up these: http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/06/fair_use_use_it.htm... http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/movies/16rams.html http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/06/26/1422248/Copyfraud-Is...
If, for example, you trade emails with the film crew saying you couldn't get permission to shoot but was going stealth anyway, and you use the mall as a location this week and in a couple days you send funding requests using only this particular movie, and the mall has a central role (as in Mallrats), then yes, you're using the mall as part of a (soon to be) commercial venture.
But if your mall movie was filmed 5 years ago (and now the mall went through a reform), was just a gathering place because the actress lives 5 minutes away from it, and the movie using it is just part of your portfolio of dozen, than I don't think any law system would judge against you.
The law is not a tech spec. Finding the balance between the two extreme examples above is the whole purpose of a government branch :)
Edit: The mall case would probably pend to a trademark side, but the point remains. Law is hard, let's go shopping! (just not on the same mall as the movie)
As you say it is "and personal, non-commercial uses.". This drafting fails as it is not clear if the last clause is a disjunct or not. The article's author misquotes this through out as "personal and non-commercial". There are differences between his version and the draft quoted.
Bear with me.
If activity denies a business of revenue which they otherwise rightly would receive then it is arguably commercial.
Hence a "personal" use could be format shifting, say. But if the business offered (or were going to offer!) the work in that format then the personal use would not be "personal and non-commercial".
tl;dr the wording is subtly ambiguous and needs clearing up
Copyright must reform, or face irrelevance. Soon.
We've got a generation of people who are actively contemptuous of copyright law, and backed up with capable technology. If the system doesn't become more reasonable, people will turn more and more to straight-up piracy instead of trying to obey the law.
It seems to me (from First Sale Doctrine) that copyright protects against increasing the number of copies, not passing copies around.
Prior to easy copying, these would have been the same thing (copying a book being difficult), but it's worth thinking about the distinction for digital media.
Redistribution in this context would mean using ones copy to create further copies. If the number of copies you bought is the number you sold then you're simply further distributed the originals (allowed by First-Sale). The draftees would need to add a note in the interpretations section of the legislation to avoid such a discrepancy.
That's why I think the distinction is quite important for digital media - giving your copy looks very similar to making a new one.
Rather, I think we should try to do what we did with drink driving here in the UK a few years ago: raise public awareness with simple, logical, objective arguments, so that behaviour that crosses the line becomes socially unacceptable and most people stop doing it voluntarily. Then you can leave alone those who are acting reasonably but not crossing the line, overlook the occasional mild infringement because you can't go after everyone, but throw the book at the minority who repeatedly go well over the line.
I think if you set out a system where the kind of personal, non-multiplicative use we have been discussing was clearly allowed, but making additional copies and sharing them with others was not, then that would be understood by and socially acceptable to the majority. For best results, throw in some long-overdue price-fixing penalties for certain Big Media organisations, because another major reason people feel entitled to copy anything they want is because they think they've been ripped off for years, but they don't notice that not everyone whose material they're copying was part of the big rip-off scams. I think for the general public to accept a reasonable degree of copyright as fair, you probably have to show that Big Media are also paying the price for systematically over-charging people for things like CDs for years.
I can't remember the details now, but there was an interesting survey into public attitudes not so long ago, IIRC by one of the consumer groups here in the UK. It did show a very sharp distinction between people who thought it should be legal to do whatever you wanted with stuff you'd paid for properly (almost everyone) and people who thought it should be legal to copy the material and offer it to unknown other people who hadn't paid for it via P2P networks (only 20-something percent). The same survey showed that in general, people weren't (or at least weren't admitting to) sharing material as widely as the anti-copyright brigade were claiming, but certain niches (typically students and children) had a very high proportion of infringers. The most common reason given by those people was that although they knew it was wrong, they thought they'd get away with it anyway.
The reason I describe all of that is that I think it makes the problem you mentioned a moot point. If there is general acceptance that multiple-copying and redistribution isn't allowed, then you can probably ignore the kind of one-off transfer you mentioned, because it will either be legal or an infringement of little consequence anyway. It's much more important to cut down the exponential distribution of illegal copies where each new recipient shares with many more, and it's fairly easy to identify likely cases because the chances of someone legitimately e-mail that MP3 to 15 different people on the same day are slim.