James John Bell wrote:
>I'm fairly certain that at least in the United States that "fair use" laws
>allow for the use of ANY copyrighted material for educational uses, like say
>MTV music videos and television commercials incorporated into your
>educational video that you produce.
>
Fair use allows for snippets of the material to be used for the purpose
of discussion. It doesn't allow wholesale reproduction. How big a
snippet is is up for grabs, but I do not believe that fair use includes
the reproduction of an entire email, which was the original question.
I have tried to educate myself about this issue thoroughly, because what
I write for the web is a big part of how I make my living. I regularly
come across people who have downloaded huge slabs or even the entirety
of my 500-page site and who are distributing it to their "classes" using
the excuse of fair use, or who have "published" it as a "book" they are
selling on ebay, or who believe that since they are not charging
anything for it, it's okay to put their name on it and throw it up on a
site. This is even though I have prominently displayed that any
reproduction requires my permission on every single page of my site. So
I have a real different take on the whole fair use/electronic freedom
thing. I don't go slamming DMCAs up against anyone, but I am very
insistent that the material that I create belongs to me.
Harry Roth
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