I think you are talking about the fair use doctrine, which lays out what you can and cannot do with copyrighted material without getting permission from the copyright holder.
Fair use permits a party to use a copyrighted work without the copyright owner’s permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.
In fact, there are no bright-line rules in determining fair use, since it is determined on a case-by-case basis. But copyright law does establish four factors that must be considered in deciding whether a use constitutes a fair use. These factors are:
The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes;
The nature of the copyrighted work;
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
If a use is commercial it is less likely to be fair use and if it is non-commercial it is more likely to be fair use.
“Fair use” was exercised, a lot, in the 70s, when consumer grade recording equipment was widely available. The copyright holders said any reproduction of their content was illegal. The court, in the Betamax case, for instance, held that recording programs that had been broadcast over the air, for personal, private, use, was covered by “fair use”.
Could it be that it makes little or no sense? Could be some other reason too. It could even be just a rhetorical question. We would need to know what the poser of the question had in mind when asking the question. Could it be his evaluation of his interlocutors? So many possibilities.
Another interesting point is how publishers approach copyright. Yahoo! acts only if the copyright holder submits a complaint in which case Yahoo! removes the offending post. Other publishers censor posts even when the copyright holder does not submit a complaint. I approve of Yahoo!'s method.
The “fair use” is again very subjective… For ex: “reformulation” of a drug is prohibited under “copyright” until the drug goes “generic”. Why a pharma that wants to copy a successful drug is not allowed “study/ re-engineer” a drug and use different components and produce a drug that provides similar benefits?
Why drug companies need this protection? If so, why “not exact verbatim reproduction” is the only valid copyright law for other works?
Enforcement comes to mind, because IP creators will just be robbed. And who’s going to stop that? Legislators? Nah, they’re taking a long nap.
Perhaps the only solution is to tax the wealthiest more, make living standards better for all, and creators won’t have to protect their work to make a living.
Slight clarification, drugs are protected by patents, not copyright. The purpose of patents is two-fold: One obviously is that is protects the creator, but the other is that the creator must divulge the how the invention works, so others can later build on it. In other words, to advance public knowledge.
One of the requirements of a patent is that it has to be a non-obvious advancement. A slightly structural change drug’s molecule typically doesn’t qualify for a new patent.
Some may have forgotten the film “Flash of Genius” that was released several years ago. A guy tinkering in his basement, invents what the big three had been attempting to do, for years: the intermittent windshield wiper control circuit. Ford Motor straight out, ignored his patent, and stole it from him. I remember the reports in the news when he finally won his case, after years of litigation.
Ayup. In the film, the lawyer the inventor hired to defend his patent gave up. The lawyer said words to the effect “Ford has the money, and legal staff, to litigate this forever. Do you?”
Kearn’s invention was built from parts you could pick up at the local Radio Shack: a switching transistor, capacitor, and variable resistor, but no-one had put them together the way he did.
It’s a little different. You could stop people from USING your images. But you couldn’t stop them from looking at your images. And you couldn’t stop them from noticing that “hey taking that image from a point right near the ground angled upwards while framing the background with half track and with half sky and the bike in the foreground is really a cool shot” and then creating a shot like that on their own. And perhaps later, recreating that shot using a photoshop tool. And now even later, perhaps using an AI to create an entirely fictional shot based on the AI perusing all the shots available online and picking a type that looks really cool [to you]. So it is indeed a little different. I don’t know how it’ll be resolved.
That’s not true, and it’s up to the court (later) to decide if that’s an infringement. There are multiple cases of that being true. The iconic image of Obama was one such case:
Search for “art appropriation” for many other examples. Here’s a brief explanation:
20 years ago I was a member of SportsShooters, which was mostly populated with journalists and photojournalists. I’ve been round and round with issues of copyright y’all. A lot of what I’m seeing here is flat wrong. There is a lot more to copyright protection than most here are willing to realize. Let alone IP.
I can’t fathom deleting, or even just weakening IP law and copyright law. Do we no longer value hard work, creativity, and human involvement? Do we not want people to be able to profit and protect their creativity?
OpenAI is being sued by NY Times because they scaped data from behind the paywall. The courts will provide you proof of whether or not that is a violation.
Answers from LLMs have shown clear plagiarism of NYT articles. You most agree that “republishing” NYT articles as an answer is a violation of copyright.
Reddit is making a ton of money by selling their content to LLM developers. That fact that it is being paid for is tacit proof that just taking it is likely a violation of copyright laws. When you pay to access NYT or join Reddit for free, you likely have to agree to a usage clause. If there was not one in the past, you can be everyone now bans scaping.
