Copyright and Fair Use

ETA: COMMENTS ARE MODERATED.

I am done moderating through comments on what a dumb decision this judge made and so on. If you have something to add go for it, but if you plan to simply state a yes or no opinion on the case, I will dump your comment. Also, some pro tips: the odds are excellent that you have no idea what Fair Use is, and you also have not read my piece below which is about the ideas behind fair use and copyright and has almost nothing to do with the case mentioned on PetaPixel.

Please note, again: I don't care if you agree or disagree with the judge. Add something besides your opinion, or your comment will be deleted.

I will delete your comment extra hard if you make it clear that either a) you have no idea what Fair Use means and/or b) have not read my remarks below more or less in their entirety.

Begone, louts.

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Here's an article on PetaPixel, about a court ruling. The comments are a saddening microcosm of internet opinions.

People who hold copyrights on things tend to imagine that a copyright constitutes more or less infinite control and rights, because, essentially, it's mine! They imagine that the copyright on a photograph, or a novel, is essentially the same thing as ownership of a hammer. Often they're a little looser about copyrights held by other people.

Copyrights aren't like owning a hammer, and they should not be.

The ability (not the right, the ability) to use a hammer, to rent it out, to sell it, to destroy it, these are all inextricable from the physical object. If I am driving a nail with your hammer, you cannot also drive a nail with it. If I possess it, I can with some effort destroy it. If I take your hammer from you, then you don't have a hammer any more, and you cannot drive nails, rent it out, destroy it. If I take a copy of your novel, you've still got your novel. If I am reading your novel, you can still read it yourself, or give it away. Copyright is about right to copy, because it deals with things that can be taken without taking them away. It's not the same as ownership of a hammer, or a cow, or a tract of land. It's going to look a bit different.

The point of copyright is, at least in theory, to maximize social good. The reason you have a copyright on a photo, or a poem, is not because you are awesome and deserve to sell your poem for tons of money. No, you have a copyright because we have as a society decided that we'd like to encourage you to make more poems, so we give you a bundle of rights that allow you to make money and otherwise benefit from making poems. This is quite a new idea, whereas the idea of owning a tool or a cow is many thousands of years old, at least.

You get these rights to your poem, or your photo, as a part of a quid pro quo. Since the point is social good, that means that we, as society, get to benefit from your poem. We get to read it, and, this is important, there is a doctrine of Fair Use that gives us out here in the world access to further benefits. We can, in particular, use your poem to make new things from. We can build our ideas on top of your ideas.

This is extremely important to intellectual and cultural progress. If we cannot build on one another's ideas in a fairly liberal way, society stagnates. See Nina Paley's video, cited below.

Things which can be copyrighted differ from hammers. A hammer has a certain utility, but its utility is nothing like that of an idea. Your poem can serve as the basis for a tower of ideas, infinitely tall and wide. Your poem can spark almost anything. If I copy your poem, the possibilities are rather broader than if I simply take your hammer. Your poem probably sucks, and will go nowhere, but that's not the point. What if it could lead somewhere?

Powerful entities which hold copyrights (i.e not you) work more or less continuously to weaken the quid pro quo and to turn copyright into, essentially, the same set of rights as hammer ownership. This is a terrible idea. Worse, the entities which do this work are never the original artist, and they are never seeking to benefit the original artist.

Much as I hate TED and all its campfollowers, I am going to point you to Nina Paley arguing at a TEDx very cogently about the flaws of copyright: Copyright is Brain Damage.

Fair Use is, by design, pretty vague. It's codified in law as a set of things to be considered, not as anything that even resembles a set of rules for what is and isn't Fair Use. Case law provides more guidance here, and Fair Use tends to differ wildly by type of medium.

In particular, the RNC's use is probably Fair Use. I'm not a lawyer, but I've looked at some cases, and this looks reasonable.

Fair Use is a really good idea. You should support it and, perhaps, try to have some notion of what it actually is.