Theos-Talk Archives (July 1999 Message tt00026)

Harry Hillman Chartrand, in "Copyright and the New World Economic Order" 
wrote:
<< By contrast the operative concept in the United States is 'fair use' 
which, in the simplest terms, means: Nonprofit use is fair use." >>  (** see 
full credit at end of e-mail)

Unfortunately, we cannot just use the simplest terms when we look into this. 
U.S. Copyright now recognizes that an item without a copyright notice still 
can be considered to be copyrighted, if it can be reasonably expected by most 
readers that the material could be so copyrighted. In other words, a book or 
article that someone shares by e-mail could still be considered copyrighted, 
because it is copyrightable, and because, even though the author didn't say 
"copyright", he might have intended it not be be shared without permission.

Yes, though, there is "fair use". However, fair use does not allow an 
individual or a non-profit entity such as a school or religious organization, 
to copy an entire work. Fair use, though, does allow for using an extract, a 
small part of the whole, while giving credit for that use back to the author. 
If someone intends to use an entire book with a class of students, or a 
substantial portion of that book, it can be reasonably expected that the 
teacher should purchase the books, have the students borrow the books, or 
have written permission to make the copies. Professors and Teachers are made 
to very clearly understand these policies. I've been there.

The issue of "is the matter published" becomes somewhat of a moot point the 
moment that copies of the material are made and distributed. As long as the 
author has not made one copy of his material, he cannot copyright it. For 
example, you cannot copyright your diary, because you have not published it. 
However, if you copied your diary and gave it to several friends, you could 
then put a copyright notice on it, because it has been published in one form. 
If you e-mail a document to several people, the U.S. copyright oversight 
agency would allow you to consider it copyrighted, because the e-mailed 
material represents copies of the material, and e-mail has come to be known 
as one method of publication.

Even if this were not part of the law in the United States, the concept of 
FAIR USE in its personal sense, not as a part of any law, could seem to 
indicate that you are not being fair to an author of something, copyrighted 
or not, if you start distributing entire copies of his material without 
permission, especially if such copies give insufficient information about the 
author. This happened to me in 1977-1979. I wrote a 16K Level One TRS-80 Star 
Trek game. It was the first microcomputer based Star Trek game ever. Copies 
of the game were out and in use within a few months of the day the computer 
was first released to the public. The founder of SLUG (the St Louis Users 
Group) admitted that he removed my copyright notice so that he could legally 
give it away. He also told me "It's not worth $15 so I'm going to give it 
away" (note he never bought a copy, I'd given it to a salesman that he knew). 
That certainly was not fair use. His giving the program away to his users 
group, and giving copies to other users groups, and salesmen who gave the 
program to customers who bought the TRS80 from them, all prevented me from 
making money from that material. What publisher wanted to sell a program that 
was given away coast to coast before I even had a chance to inquire about 
publication. By the way, when I gave the program to a few friends, I was 
giving it to them for "demonstration purposes." It was people they gave it to 
who abused it. And most of the abusers were persons, not companies.

No matter what we think about the law in various countries, we need to think 
about what is FAIR to the author, whether we think the material is 
copyrighted, copyrightable, neither, or the equivalent in another country. If 
someone writes ten paragraphs about a topic to a group of friends, and we 
want to comment on one thing the person said, we have no right to copy the 
entire ten paragraphs when we make our comment. FAIR USE would imply that we 
can copy that ONE or TWO things that we are commenting on, giving credit to 
the original author, and comment on those things in our reply. Note that I 
did this with my comment, though probably going overboard in my "credit".

In a group like Theosophy, we'll never have one standard that will apply to 
all of us, but fairness is something that we can try to use as a defacto 
standard. I would certainly want that to apply to the material that I've 
posted to my web pages that might be of interest to others. 

For example, in my search for material about the Lord's Prayer being in 
existence before the birth of Jesus, I found a web page posted by a 
Theosophist. I quoted from his page, and gave a link to his page with the 
quote. I consider that to be fair use. I did not ask his permission to use 
the material, but someone that is interested can figure out how to contact 
him from his web page. 

As a further example, I distributed my thoughts about that 150 B.C. Lord's 
Prayer to a group of contacts on <www.SixDegrees.com>. Several people replied 
back to me about my comments. I used their comments on a second page that is 
linked to the first page.
 
You can find my comments about the Lord's Prayer and those person's replies 
to me at <http://members.aol.com/aacmrmaze/LordsPrayer.html>.

Well, enough rambling, I think I'll send this off. (and if you want to know 
what I look like, it's in the article at 
<http://members.aol.com/aacmrmaze/TheMorningNews.html>.

John Knoderer

** cited paragraph at beginning of this e-mail comes from "COPYRIGHT AND THE 
NEW WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER" by Harry Hillman Chartrand, Cultural Economist & 
Publisher, Compiler Press; and Editor of "The Compleat Canadian Copyright Act 
1921 to 1997 plus Annual Update '98," "The Compleat Multilateral Copyright 
and Related Agreements, Conventions, Covenants & Treaties 1998." For more 
information, please contact h-chartrand@home.com

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