Re: Fair use

Bernie Campbell wrote on 27/02/2006 07:30 PM:

> I know that downloading software, mp3's and video from the web
> would be a copyright infringement. There are even sites that protect
> their images from being copied. Obviously, copying an image from one
> of these sites would be illegal.

I would greatly appreciate it if other members on this list can tell me if I understand fair use correctly. The way I understand it, "fair use" is not something which is either granted or withheld by the author of work. Instead, it is a concession granted by law or in terms of the principles of fairness itself. There is nothing an author can do, legally speaking, to prevent the use of his work if such work is deemed "fair use". Even if the author would try to prevent copying, and fails to do so, and the copying would be "fair use" type of use, the fact that he had attempted to prevent the use would have no legal effect on the measure of fairness of "fair use", am I right?

If so, then web sites' methods of preventing users from copying images do not in themselves prevent fair use of such images, if users were to succeed in copying those images.

There are many methods used by web sites to prevent copying of images. Some techniques used to prevent less savvy users from copying images, include: using a script which prevents right-clicking (to prevent "Save As" operations), using the image as a background and placing a transparent image on top of it (so that the image saved by the user, is the transparent one and not the one which is visible on the web site), and breaking up the image into several pieces while displaying them as a unit on the web site (causes the user to save only one part of the image, if the user isn't aware of this trick). None of these techniques are guaranteed to work, and probably the easiest way circumvent all of these, is to capture a screenshot of the web site and crop it down to the image.

Samuel Received on Tue Feb 28 2006 - 22:15:00 GMT