The other side of that problem is that over last 100 years or so, the nature of copying itself has changed.
It used to be that in order to do anything that was relevant to copyright law, you basically needed a small factory (a printing press). Everybody involved was already counting copies for commercial reasons, so basing a law off of the number of copies was no real hardship on anyone and impacted only on the relatively small number of producers.
Today, copying happens all the time — computers and computer networks do it automatically and frequently, it's one of the basic operations. Even children's toys do it, the kind that gets thrown in a corner and forgotten by the New Year.
The cost of copying has fallen drastically, but the cost of dealing with copyright has not. Thus we end up with situations where an indie movie costs a three-digit sum to produce but would cost an additional five-digit sum to "clear copyrights".
Oh, and as for infringing copyright by paraphrasing the US Constitution, you aren't. I'm not sure which law would apply, but the British copyright would've long since expired and the US copyright would've never applied to government documents in the first place, and also long since expired. In any case, quoting a single sentence for the purposes of commentary is likely to be fair use in any system.
Which is not to say LJ would bother standing up for your rights if someone went "boo" at them.
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Date: 2009-03-01 04:14 am (UTC)It used to be that in order to do anything that was relevant to copyright law, you basically needed a small factory (a printing press). Everybody involved was already counting copies for commercial reasons, so basing a law off of the number of copies was no real hardship on anyone and impacted only on the relatively small number of producers.
Today, copying happens all the time — computers and computer networks do it automatically and frequently, it's one of the basic operations. Even children's toys do it, the kind that gets thrown in a corner and forgotten by the New Year.
The cost of copying has fallen drastically, but the cost of dealing with copyright has not. Thus we end up with situations where an indie movie costs a three-digit sum to produce but would cost an additional five-digit sum to "clear copyrights".
Oh, and as for infringing copyright by paraphrasing the US Constitution, you aren't. I'm not sure which law would apply, but the British copyright would've long since expired and the US copyright would've never applied to government documents in the first place, and also long since expired. In any case, quoting a single sentence for the purposes of commentary is likely to be fair use in any system.
Which is not to say LJ would bother standing up for your rights if someone went "boo" at them.
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