[boko]

And I don't mean by inciting violence(!).

I'm talking about the fact that the music industry and now the publishing industry (record company suit-wearers not the music-makers and now media-ad-sales departments, not 'journalists' - since they/you are on 'our' side) - are facing a drop in profits every time internet publishing surges upwards. The rise of blogs and forumtraffic is just another layer on top of so many others, burying the former advert-money-squeezing world deeper and deeper. After only a preliminary journey of research on the matter, I found the following thing which justifies pofo being profitable AND also 'quoting' sources from so many places where only 'non-commercial' reproduction of text is allowed...

The practical effect of this law and the court decisions following it is that it is usually possible to quote from a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment upon it, teach students about it, and possibly for other uses. Certain well-established uses cause few problems. A teacher who prints a few copies of a poem to illustrate a technique will have no problem on all four of the above factors (except possibly on amount and substantiality), but some cases are not so clear. All the factors are considered and balanced in each case: a book reviewer who quotes a paragraph as an example of the author's style will probably fall under fair use even though he may sell his review commercially. But a non-profit educational website that reproduces whole articles from technical magazines will probably be found to infringe if the publisher can demonstrate that the website affects the market for the magazine, even though the website itself is non-commercial.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Am i right? Does the above refer to a strong defence/defense for pofo?


The trouble is that our newspapers (even guardian and bbc) are now building up incomes from adsales online. In essence, they may nonetheless have grounds to claim that it is an act of unfair competition (if they admit their product is "advertising" - i.e. what they sell - everything else is free - then that would make them the SAME as pofo).

[Kim]

The only way they can legally do anything is if all text on the Internet that was being copied were put on a picture file, then it would be harder to copy but not impossible.

[boko]

Found the thing that means there's no question that it's fully legal to make a profitable blog or forum regardless of whether people post news excerpts on it (from sources which allow noncommercial excerpts) -

it's coz no one's "buying" the text - the text isn't "re-sold" therefore no law is broken - however there are circs in which you could do something which does break the law - usually by putting pressure on 'opinion' - eg "anti-advertising" as a concept may turn out to be illegal (shame, i'd like to go into that)

this is the thing i found, of all places i found it at arsypedia...
(is arsypedia an anti-advertising term? will anyone sue me? i hope so)

The practical effect of this law and the court decisions following it is that it is usually possible to quote from a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment upon it, teach students about it, and possibly for other uses. Certain well-established uses cause few problems. A teacher who prints a few copies of a poem to illustrate a technique will have no problem on all four of the above factors (except possibly on amount and substantiality), but some cases are not so clear. All the factors are considered and balanced in each case: a book reviewer who quotes a paragraph as an example of the author's style will probably fall under fair use even though he may sell his review commercially. But a non-profit educational website that reproduces whole articles from technical magazines will probably be found to infringe if the publisher can demonstrate that the website affects the market for the magazine, even though the website itself is non-commercial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

[Kim]

Well that is a promotion of free speech. I don't see anything wrong with it. In fact, I am kind of glad it is around.

But you cannot do the same with movies. The FBI warnings nowadays say that even if you do not make a monetary gain, you can still be fined for copying.

[boko]

Of course it's freedom of speech and it's right, and in the main it has thusfar protected the rights of those who want to use their brain to comment, to assess, to 'review'

But i work in e-marketing and i have every suspicion that the google adsense revolution will take a turn in the direction of opinionsites making more and more 'spam-type' income

there's a fine fine line between spam opinion and real opinion and often surface appearances are totally misleading

but whether or not there's a fine line, the numer of people who cross over into the spam arena seems to increase daily

the list of vehicles they use for spam seems to broaden its range every time common usage of software broadens ITS range

eg the other day a mate of mine's web 'guest book' came under spam attack from hackers seeking google pageranks... they make an entry that says "nice site" or some stupid synonym and include their website address in the link field. they do this with lots of random emails and lots of commercial-spam websites so they build up links all over the web by seeking 'weak' guestbooks.

fortunately i'm a mate of my mate, so i took the script and rewired it so that they can't spam it no more no more no more.

but basically the law of the planet is - "if the monkey CAN abuse it, the monkey WILL abuse it".

however the safety provided at the present moment by the law issue i cited from arseypedia does in fact protect me and my plans, however i predict that within 3 years there will be a huge backlash from the mainstream advertising world, attempting to fight google back for the ad revenues, using the spam contingent as an excuse to feck with google itself, rather than stopping the spam one on one (nobody's clever enough to figure out how to do THAT yet)

funny thing though, when a politically-motivated institution makes money they/we call it "fundraising", when capitalists make money they/we call it "income"

perhaps the third way merges the two into "income-raising"