If Anonymous Coward had taken the time to carefully read my article, then he or she would have known that I was writing about the practice of people in my Player Piano group putting their entire collections of music up on the web as mp3s.
At first I thought this was a great idea, allowing other people to hear this great music, and particularly since most of the rolls are "old", and falling apart.
However, under US law putting the rolls up on the Internet is not an "archival purpose", and the point of the article was to show that even an old song "Greensleeves" has several layers of copyright attached to it that keep it "in copyright".
Since I have been (unfortunately) working with copyright law for close to thirty years, I am "intimately familiar with section 108 of copyright law", but since that section does not apply AT ALL to this situation, my argument of using less than 30 seconds of a three or four minute song would probably fall more under section 107 of US copyright law, that of "fair use", particularly the sections on the amount of material copied (a small portion of the work), the effect on the potential value of the copied work (probably would increase the value, if anything), and the non-profit educational value (which was the intent of my fellow members in the first place).
So despite the fact of having dated a librarian, most of Anonymous Cowards' long diatribe was simply wrong.
The rest of the comments here are typically because these people do not read my column regularly (to know that I often write with sarcasm) and particularly did not read this specific article nor the comments that happened on that site.
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Re: What did I want?
At first I thought this was a great idea, allowing other people to hear this great music, and particularly since most of the rolls are "old", and falling apart.
However, under US law putting the rolls up on the Internet is not an "archival purpose", and the point of the article was to show that even an old song "Greensleeves" has several layers of copyright attached to it that keep it "in copyright".
Since I have been (unfortunately) working with copyright law for close to thirty years, I am "intimately familiar with section 108 of copyright law", but since that section does not apply AT ALL to this situation, my argument of using less than 30 seconds of a three or four minute song would probably fall more under section 107 of US copyright law, that of "fair use", particularly the sections on the amount of material copied (a small portion of the work), the effect on the potential value of the copied work (probably would increase the value, if anything), and the non-profit educational value (which was the intent of my fellow members in the first place).
So despite the fact of having dated a librarian, most of Anonymous Cowards' long diatribe was simply wrong.
The rest of the comments here are typically because these people do not read my column regularly (to know that I often write with sarcasm) and particularly did not read this specific article nor the comments that happened on that site.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by maddog.
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