Re: compulsory licenses and electronic material

Mary Brandt Jensen notes that some copyright doctrines allowing uses of printed materials may not help with e-materials because the latter require public display or performance to be useful:

> We didn't have a similar problem in the print world. The copyright
> act contains sufficent provisions to permit ordinary uses and
> presevation of works even after the returns drop to the point
> where copyright owners have no incentive to license. But this isn't
> true of electronic works. Some key provisions of the Act applicable
> to print are not applicable to machine readable works.

If this proves true, I would tend to agree that the law has not kept up with technological changes and that legal changes are in order. But before I reached that conclusion, I wonder if we could focus the discussion with some examples. What are some circumstances under which uses of printed materials would be allowed but comparable uses (the functionally equivalent use) of e-materials would not be?

            --Trotter Hardy

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