You Probably Don't Want to Read This Entry About Copyright

So, as I mentioned in yesterday's entry about plagiarism
and attribution, I wanted to talk a little about some
copyright issues. But do I
really?

After all, I Am Not A
Lawyer (IANAL -- it's an
acronym in common use); I am also not a copyright expert or authority
on intellectual property law.

Besides, all of these
are heady and mind-numbing (albeit important)
topics, especially for a Friday early-evening.

So
you probably should just ignore what I'm
saying.

Additionally, I don't have anything
substantive to add about:

* RSS
aggregation of individuals's content by commercial
entities

* The Creative Commons
license

* The question: "Are all mug shots in
the Public Domain?"

* The Public
Domain

* Public Domain
Images

* Or even, the broader issue of
plagiarism

Instead,
I wanted to dust off a couple of links about a Scary Copyright
Question from back in December (as seen in BoingBoing):

What
If Copyright Law Were Strongly Enforced in the
Blogosphere?

I'm not going to
restate the whole article, but I will boil it down to
this:

* "Fair Use" is probably not
as permissive as you might think -- small quotes or excerpts
are probably okay, but if you start copy-and-pasting large portions of
news articles or other blogs, etc, you are most likely, technically,
violating copyright (even if it's a noncommercial
use)

* People online have been able to "get away
with it" so far, just because in most cases, copyright holders have
bigger fish to fry than your average individual
blogger.

* What if copyright
holders started going after all those small fry bloggers, just like the
RIAA is going after individual music
downloaders?

The article also links to a Wall Street
Journal article from October about stock
photo companies (like Getty and Corbis) and how they're
trying to go after folks who use their photos without
permission.

Talking about Copyright and Fair
Use issues is a big, headache-inducing,
legalistic mess, though it may be more palatable in comic book
form (as recently linked on fark.com).

Anyway,
I'm not trying to chill anyone's blogging. It looks
to me like the genie is out of the bottle, and copyright will have to
start adapting to the big ole sphere o' blogs (see the Creative Commons
license), rather than the reverse, but then again, I am not an expert
in, well, much of anything. 

My lack of
expertise shows as I finish pounding out a large
chunk of not-too-light reading on copyright and fair use issues, that
doesn't answer any questions and could conceivably cause me more
heartache than any possible benefit, on a Friday evening. (What was I
thinking?)

Thanks. -- Joe