Re: Re: Exclusive jurisdiction -- remand or dismiss?

>> Copyright is not supposed to be airtight. This looks to me like the
>> law is working just like we'd want it to, preventing nuisance suits
>> for insignificant infringements.
>
>Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way is that federalizing
>copyright removed remedies for infringement that were appropriately scaled
>to the infringements' level of "insignificance." In their place is a system
>that clearly doesn't work for the great majority of creators. You can blame
>the creators or you can accept that the system shares the blame, as well.

I suppose that's true if you define "doesn't work" to mean "doesn't let them demand payment for insignificant use of their material."

Having been in the book biz for a while, I see an awful lot of wishful thinking by people on the margins that they somehow deserve to get their tiny slice of the pie when a tiny bit of their stuff shows up somewhere. That ain't how it works.

I have written a lot of books about the Internet, in which there are a lot of pictures of web sites. I have always maintained that the use of these images falls squarely within fair use (confirmed in practice by a complete lack of threats or complaints over the past 12 years), but for a while in the maximum greed part of the dot.com bubble, my publisher was demanding permission for everything.

So what happened? For about half of the screen shots I would have used, I decided I didn't care that much, and I did something else. For the rest, we had someone send them a letter asking for permission. If the answer was "OK" or perhaps "OK if you acknowledge us on the copyright page", we used it. If they set conditions or asked for payment, we dropped it. As a result, the books in that era had a lot of screen shots of the Census Bureau and other PD sites, and nobody got paid any more than they would otherwise. I think my actions were completely typical of what real authors do under those circumstances.

The alternative to leakage and no money isn't leakage and money, it's no leakage and no money. Would that be to anyone's benefit? I don't think so. Considering that the goal of the copyright clause is to get material published and eventually into the public domain, it would also be contrary to public policy.

R's,
John Received on Tue Oct 18 2005 - 01:40:01 GMT