[ExtractStream] Re: My dangerous idea.

[steve bryan]

At 3:53 pm -0400 6/29/01, sharkey@a... wrote:
> > Will Mr. Rogers
>> sue me for making copies of his show that he gave
>> to me for free over the airwaves? (j/k)
>
>If Mr. Rogers is the copyright holder for his works, it would be within
>his rights to do so. Whether he will or not is up to him.

I'll violate my earlier promise only to point out that the case of Mr 
Rogers is an interesting choice. In the famous case of Sony vs 
Universal Studios, Mr Rogers testified that he would want to 
encourage people to videotape his show in order to increase the 
audience as much as possible. This testimony apparently served a 
useful purpose in Sony's successful defense of the betamax device 
having sufficient non-infringing use to justify its continued legal 
availability.

As far as the reference to Ms Litman's statements are concerned I'm 
afraid I might have been quoting her out of context. I've loaned the 
book out so I can't easily check the details. I think she might have 
been specifically referring to digital copies. I believe the theory 
is that if the copyright is for a digital document (eg a CD) then any 
time a copy is made, even an ephemeral copy of a portion in RAM in 
order to present the contents, that an act of infringement has been 
committed unless a licence is obtained whether or not there is any 
commercial aspect to the act. I might try to look this up sometime 
this weekend.
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