IANAL and copyright seems to be one big minefield. I make art myself and while I certainly want to see creative expression encouraged and rewarded, for me the balance has tipped far away from notions of fair use and too far toward excessively lengthy corporate rights of ownership in works. And sometimes the hammer comes down pretty hard even on "loose" usage. Time-Warner made YouTube take down a 29 second clip a woman made of her toddler dancing around to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy". The Spoiler Slayer ran into problems over the ads he had linking to BtVS products on Amazon while to me he was providing Fox with free advertising.
I volunteer preparing e-texts for Project Gutenberg and right now pretty much anything (with a few exceptions) published after 1923 is locked up tighter than a drum until 2018. Unfortunately, a lot of genre books that are out of print are probably going to be lost before those 95 years are up.
The patent office recently rejected claims by Monsanto (http://www.pubpat.org/monsantorejections.htm) that farmers were injuring Monsanto by saving seed from one year's crop to replant the next. Putting on my gardener's hat here, seed saving is as old as agriculture itself.
Oops, didn't mean to go off on you. Obviously copyright is one of my peeves. :)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2007-08-20 04:38 am (UTC)I volunteer preparing e-texts for Project Gutenberg and right now pretty much anything (with a few exceptions) published after 1923 is locked up tighter than a drum until 2018. Unfortunately, a lot of genre books that are out of print are probably going to be lost before those 95 years are up.
The patent office recently rejected claims by Monsanto (http://www.pubpat.org/monsantorejections.htm) that farmers were injuring Monsanto by saving seed from one year's crop to replant the next. Putting on my gardener's hat here, seed saving is as old as agriculture itself.
Oops, didn't mean to go off on you. Obviously copyright is one of my peeves. :)