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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Hmmmm...hint of conspiracy theory; xenophobia; out of context quotes from law; no idea how fair use actually works; extreme hyperbole; general cluelessness.

In other words, a typical Mike Masnick piece. I do not understand why anyone takes Techdirt seriously.

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Yeah, I CANNOT IMAGINE why anyone would assume anything ill of the revolving door between business and government, what a bunch of conspiracists. You also might want to learn what the word "xenophobia" means since at no point in this article does it discuss foreign actors or organizations.

> You also might want to learn what the word "xenophobia" means since at no point in this article does it discuss foreign actors or organizations

"Two out of the three publishers are foreign publishing giants"

"funding some foreign publishers"

"supporting foreign publishers"

Yeah but it has nothing to do with the fact that they are specifically foreign but pointing out yet another point of ridiculousness with the administration's position on this matter given this is 2/3rds foreign agents vs American colleges. Xenophobia is just a ridiculous accusation by OP to personally attack the author of this article.

Not to nit pick but...

"Two out of the three publishers are foreign publishing giants..."

The point is that the President of the United States, supposedly the representative of Americans, is directing his administration to protect the financial interests of foreign companies to the detriment of the academic mission of an American university. That is not really xenophobia, at least not in my view...

"no idea how fair use actually works"

Fair use is decided by a judge; there is no specific rule about it. You have no better understanding of how fair use "works" than the author of the article does, because two seemingly identical actions can diverge on fair use.

The real problem here is that we have a President whose administration thinks a university is doing something wrong by making information available to its students using the best resources it has at its disposal. Yet somehow, mass numbers of the university students I encountered last fall were campaigning for that President and his administration...

The fair use rule: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

Factors to be considered are not hard and fast rules. A judge needs to consider the factors; there is no specific threshold, combination, or minimum number of factors that must come into play. This is meant to be decided by judges.

Yes. I believe the point is that, although the law includes the word "education" [oops: "teaching"], that does not automatically exempt colleges from copyright law, as techdirt seems to imply.

for those of us just following along from home, care to provide some specifics, the nature of the fair use misunderstanding, and where xenophobia, conspiracy theories reside in this article ?

He quotes a part of the copyright law that is giving examples of the kind of things that might be fair use, and then cuts it off before it gets to the part where it lists factors to be considered when deciding if a particular use is fair use. He seems to think that anything that falls under the examples is automatically fair use.

The xenophobia comes from the several needless mentions of the fact that some of the publishers are foreign owned.

The conspiracy theory stuff comes from the part about someone who once worked for the RIAA now being at the Copyright Office. If you follow the links, you find that the former RIAA person was a litigator for the RIAA. Yawn. Litigators are the hired guns of the legal profession. You can't tell much about a litigator's views on policy issues from who they have litigated for.

Before the RIAA, she was a litigator at a private firm. Before that she worked at the DOJ working on civil rights cases. Before that she was a clerk for a Court of Appeal judge. Before that she was editor of the Columbia Law Review.

The main reasons a litigator would typically jump from a private law firm to an in-house position would be (1) more frequent or challenging cases, and (2) money.

> He quotes a part of the copyright law that is giving examples of the kind of things that might be fair use, and then cuts it off before it gets to the part where it lists factors to be considered when deciding if a particular use is fair use. He seems to think that anything that falls under the examples is automatically fair use.

This is a frequent misunderstanding...and one that seems to keep escaping TechDirt writers over the years. "Fair" in this case does not mean "noble"...as in, "well, educating inner-city schoolkids is noble, so it's OK for me to torrent the latest Harry Potter movie as part of our fiction reading unit."

That may be indeed a noble use, and I bet you could get any number of people/companies to donate you the DVD for it, but it's not a "fair use."

I'm not sure it qualifies as "xenophobia" per se (i.e. "intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries"). The point seems to be that the politicians are acting against the interests of their own, American constituents, not attempting to incite an irrational, automatic mistrust of foreigners.

Also, usually, xenophobia is directed at people, not companies. But I suppose that can be a blurry distinction where law is concerned :) You are quite fair to point out that we don't know exactly what they will say yet. Ironically, when we do know, it will be far too late for outrage to change things.

Finally, I should point out that way back at the start of Obama's administration, there was an influx of litigators going from the RIAA to the DOJ. I believe you can find posts by one Ray Beckerman on that subject if you look for them and people have been noticing a trend ever since. I think people became more sensitive to the politics of hiring people at the DOJ after all the Bush-era controversies over that.

EDIT: Found one of the articles. Here's a post about that issue from 2009 - http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2009/04/anothe...

From that article: "[Ed. note. I now know of 6 RIAA lawyers who have joined the Justice Department under the new administration. Under the law, these lawyers are all recused from involvement in any matter involving the RIAA or EMI, Vivendi Universal, SONY BMG, or Warner Bros Records. -R.B.]"

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