Comments on: Episode #101: Fair Use and Access (Shutdown Edition)

By: Google Books Lawsuit – Fair Use and Public Interest

Google Books Lawsuit – Fair Use and Public Interest — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 20:29:36 +0000

[…] Digital Campus run an interesting series of podcasts on education and digital media and addressed the outcome of the lawsuit in their latest episode, Episode #101: Fair Use and Access (Shutdown Edition). You can listen to it yourself here. […]

By: Amanda French

Amanda French — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 15:09:05 +0000

Ooh, thanks for the corrections, Peter. I think I knew that the Bruce Willis thing hadn’t actually gone to a lawsuit, but I missed that it was at first, incorrectly, reported as a lawsuit. Here’s a link for posterity to an article about that incorrect report: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/blogs/gear-up/bruce-willis-did-not-sue-apple-over-his-itunes-library-20120905

We should have you on as a guest …

By: Peter Hirtle

Peter Hirtle — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 20:47:23 +0000

Fascinating show, as usual. The discussion of first sale, however, was a little off the mark. The first sale doctrine is embodied in Section 109 of the Copyright Act. It tempers the copyright owner’s exclusive right of distribution. Imagine if there was no first sale doctrine. Since the copyright owner has the exclusive right to distribute a work, that would mean that you could not sell a used copy of a book because that would also entail a further distribution of the copyrighted work embedded in the physical book. Section 109 says that the first sale of a work in print form exhausts the copyright owner’s ability to control subsequent distributions.

Digital files present two problems. First, digital files are sold not by providing a physical copy of a work, but by reproducing a copy, which interferes with the copyright owner’s exclusive right of reproduction (and which is not affected by Section 109). It would be a relatively simple change to copyright law to amend 109 to allow for services that make a copy on a new device, then delete the file from the original device. The second problem with digital files is that they are most often licensed, not sold. If the license terms prevent further distribution, there is little that copyright law can do right now to offset this.

Amanda was correct that remix and first sale are two different problems. And the idea that Bruce Willis was worried about leaving his iTunes library to his children was quickly dismissed as a made-up U.K. Sunday Times story (though it is true that you cannot transfer ownership of mp3s unless they are only on physical media that one gives away).