Kahle v. AshcroftVarious educational materials and the "fair use" grey area
originally submitted by Michael Dolan:
I used to work at Kinkos, and nearly every day I was faced with questions about copyright and fair use.
Stifled uses
Michael Dolan:
We were located next to a large university, and professors would want to copy class materials for their students. Some of these were textbooks or reference manuals which were out of print and would have fallen into the public domain forty years ago. Even works that were clearly in the public domain could not be copied because the combination of the spacing and typeface could also be considered copyrighted if the book was printed in the last 75 years. Consider Shakespeare: there is no true version of Hamlet. Bits are taken from the first quarto and the second folio and the entire second act is taken from the fourth quarto (I'm making this example up as I go). That combination is technically copyrighted. Also, the phrase “fair use” is so convoluted and vague it might as well mean nothing. There are actually provisions for educational use in the law, but if a professor drops off a stack of reading material for their students, and I made one copy for each of their students, is that one copy for educational reasons, or thirty because the professor wanted it done thirty times?
The other issue I was constantly faced with (as others have mentioned) is professional photographs. Most of the time these were for funerals. Once I was even faced with the idea of telling a very distraught couple I could not make copies of a picture of their missing nine year old son for flayers they wanted to post in the neighborhood. Of course I did, but it was technically illegal.
The view of the corporation when I worked there was “just don't do it. You are not a lawyer.” Most of the time our customers were not making money on what they were making copies of... But we still were. In the days following 9/11, Kinkos let people make free copies of missing posters for the family members of victims. No money changed hands, but if the photos were taken by someone other than the person placing the order for the copies, it was still illegal.
justin:
Something similar happens with translations. A few famous translations have made it onto the net (garnett's translation of War and Peace, for instance, or the Longfellow or Mandelbaum translation of Divine Commedy), but most translations of less-famous works and translations by less-famous translators are difficult to locate once they go out of print.
All of which raises the question of whether translations ought to be copyrighted for 75 or 95 or however many years they are. I don't think translations should have as long copyright periods, but that's outside the scope of this lawsuit I suppose.