Fair use? What's fair use?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 24th, 2004

Just received the following email:

As the sole owner of the published Jim Carrey interview, I hereby request the removal of the text taken from the Taipei Times in the following website:

URL for Posting Here

You should know that copyright infringements are against the law and you do not have the right to publish such interview neither copy any part of it.

I appreciate an answer regarding this issue or legal actions will follow.

NAME WITHHELD BY US

Get a load of this guy! Throwing around vague threats and peppering his email with crap about “copyright infringements!” Well, for your informationl, mister, we took Journalism Law THREE TIMES before we finally passed it! There’s this little legal do-jiggy known as “fair use.”

You know how when your college professor usta Xerox a bunch of pages from a book and hand it out to the class so they might better understand the current topic of discussion? Well, he didn’t pay the author for that material. However, the courts have ruled, time and again, that such use falls under what has become known simply as “fair use,” and, as such, doesn’t violate any copyright infringement. There were limits, however– you can’t Xerox an entire book, for instance. That would be naughty.

There have been a few bloggers and websites here and there who’ve been sued for copyright infringement. But those cases almost all involved video or an image– as you can imagine, it’s near impossible to use only a portion of an image. And video? Well, video is… special.

In the past, when we’ve discovered a site or a blog running an entire interview of ours, we’ve written letters to these blogs and sites asking them to take it down. But then, we offer an alternative: Run a paragraph or two, then link to the full text of the interview on our site. (And we never threaten anyone with a lawsuit!)

But what we did with this gentleman’s article– excerpt a paragraph, then link to the URL containing the entire piece– hardly constitutes a copyright infringement. Matt Drudge has made a nice living off it. You may have heard of him, Mr. Author Man.

Nonetheless, we’ve taken down the paragraph. (And we blew out the link, too. To hell with him. Come to think of it, I think I’ll go back and edit the posting to excise his name as well.) Not that we’re afraid of any legal action… we’re what is known in the legal biz as “judgement proof!” (It sounds like a good thing, but it has its downside!)

We can’t figure out his beef. It seems like a win for all concerned– we provide a nugget of information for our readers, hip them to an interview online, they go to it. The website harboring the article gets traffic, the author’s work is read, everyone’s happy. Well, almost everyone. What planet is this guy from?

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