Text 2154, 86 rader
Skriven 2006-06-08 11:32:00 av Robert E Starr JR (2600.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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On Wed, 7 Jun 2006 19:57:25 +0000 (UTC), Amy Guskin
<aisling@fjordstone.com> wrote:

>>>On Wed, 7 Jun 2006 15:22:56 -0400, Josh Hill wrote
>(in article <8i4e821cacp22119l6gikeube2noo3tbgl@4ax.com>):
>
>Yes, fair use is a vague provision, but it isn't without parameters entirely, 
>and "common sense" isn't one of them.  But again, as I said above, no one is 
>going to spend the time and money to prosecute someone sending the occasional 
>article around to friends or colleagues - which is, at the heart of it, good 
>advertising for the source material.  But as you say, if you regularly 
>e-mailed me the columns of my favorite columnist, that certainly wouldn't 
>qualify.  Reposting an entire article in a newsgroup is definitely skirting 
>the line of turning-a-blind-eye acceptability, and I'm sure that someday, 
>someone's going to eventually get burned for doing something like that (if 
>they haven't already).

As an aside, I tend to think that a) laws are typically based on
common sense (though there are of course exceptions b) laws tend to be
from my layman's perspective surprisingly ambiguous and sloppy,
meaning that the courts are forced to interpret the provisions on the
basis of common sense and c) when a law does violate common sense,
people tend to ignore it and use common sense anyway.

Which is another way of saying that laws tend to be expressions of an
underlying social principle or goal, and that those social principles
and goals tend in real life to take precedence over the actual wording
of the law. Another way of looking at it is that the law is an
expressed Turing machine of sorts in that it tries to cover every
eventuality that causes social harm. But you can't really do that,
because a real Turing machine would have an infinite number of
responses and they would be ideally chosen.

And so to get things to work, you have to ask what principles are
behind the law -- the intent of Congress, as the courts put it. And
you have to look at practicality, e.g., whether it really makes sense
to spend $50 to send someone a newspaper clipping.

And that's what I mean by common sense being written into the law.
I've always assumed, correctly or not, that the fair use provision of
the copyright law was intentionally left vague because the people who
wrote it knew that it was impossible to catalogue all the
possibilities or agree on them if they did, and so recognized that
they have to leave room for common sense. And I don't think that's an
uncommon strategy among lawmakers -- a lot of laws seem to have
provisions along the lines of "an assault that causes significant
bodily harm to," because the drafters know that there are too many
possibilities to allow them to formulate an objective set of criteria,
but that we know a battered woman when we see her.

Damn, but I can bloviate. :-) Perhaps a lawyer will come along and
give my disordered intuition the benefit of structure and some elegant
Latin terms.

>It's another level entirely when you get to books and authors (as opposed to 
>newspapers, which have that corporate sheen around them).  Most authors make 
>little enough from their writing; to deny them their income from a sold copy 
>of a book is just criminal.  I understand the enthusiasm of fans who want to 
>know stuff but can't afford the script books, and I realize that denying 
>someone's request to post here in its entirety the abandoned Sinclair story 
>arc isn't necessarily going to make that person cave in and buy the script 
>book (because he simply might not be able to afford it), but nor can I 
>condone letting someone get away with it 'just this once' without opening my 
>big mouth, pointing, and shouting "J'accuse" (or rather "Infringement")!  
>Seriously, people, most creative artists (ones who aren't the Wachowskis, 
>Britney Spears, or Stephen King) do _not_ make a lot of money on their work.

Way true.

That being said, what /did/ Sinclair do? :-)

-- 
Josh

"I'm not going to play like I've been a person who's spent hours involved with
foreign policy.
I am who I am." - George W. Bush
                                 
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