Re: copyright expiration as a spur to creativity

On 21 Aug 1998, Edward Barrow <edward[_at_]plato32.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Timothy Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> wrote:
> >
> > Patterson and Lindberg formulate the following rule of personal use:
> >
> > An individual's use of a copyrighted work for his or her own
> > private use is a personal use, not subject to fair-use re-
> > straints. Such use includes use by copying, provided that the
> > copy is neither for public distribution or sale to others nor
> > a functional substitute for a copyrighted work currently
> > available on the market at a reasonable price. (L. Ray
> > Patterson and Stanley W. Lindberg, _The Nature of Copyright:
> > A Law of User's Rights_, U. Georgia Press, Athens, 1991.)
>
> Does this formulation have any legal backing in the US (in the form
> of statute or judicial opinion) or is it merely the wishful thinking
> of those who formulated it? The suggestion that there might be another
> class of permitted use (private use) going beyond fair use does not
> seem right to me from this side of the Atlantic.

I don't think that the rule for personal use as outlined above has any weight in any U.S. court. I vaguely recall from some old posts here in CNI-COPYRIGHT that it was common for copyright holders to sue people who copy their works merely for personal use. But, the very large majority of them were settled before their cases were completed in the courts (and thus, we do not see much of them in any published court cases). My memory may be flaky and I welcome any correction.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> Received on Sun Aug 23 1998 - 12:34:21 GMT