This is the probably the most significant distillation of Fair Use I have ever seen.
“fair use is a part of the design of copyright, it is not an exception to it,”
William F. Patry
This is a partial quote from William Patry, who is probably the pre eminent Copyright Lawyer on the planet, responding to a blog post by Patrick Ross, who probably knows less than I do about Copyright, and I am not a lawyer.
At issue are ross’s statements on Fair Use in response to a new report: Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video from The Center for Social Media at American University’s School of Communication which is a non-partisan group, unlike the Copyright Alliance whose membership reads like a roll call of Big Media, and the remora like associations that surround them.
Fair Use outlines how an excerpt of material can be used, it does not prescribe a percentage, or any guidelines as to where the line is. Fair Use is only a Defense Mechanism used in a court of law on a case by case basis. It sucks, but there it is.
Here is today’s pop quiz!
Who do you think has a better idea what Fair Use is About?
Patrick Ross, Executive Director
Patrick Ross is executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a grass-roots coalition of artists, producers and distributors from across the copyright spectrum. Prior to joining the Copyright Alliance he was a senior fellow with The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C. Ross focused on intellectual property issues for PFF’s Center for the Study of Digital Property (IPcentral.info), specifically the rights of artists. He was also PFF’s vice president for communications and external affairs.
Source Copyright Alliance
or
William F. Patry (born January 1, 1950 in Niskayuna, New York) is an American lawyer specialized on copyright law. He studied at the San Francisco State University, where he obtained a B.A. in 1974 and an M.A. in 1976, and then at the University of Houston, where he was graduated with a J.D. in 1980. He was admitted to the bar in Texas in 1981, in the District of Columbia in 2000, and in New York in 2001.[1]
Patry served as a copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives in the early 1990s, where he participated in the elaboration of the copyright provisions of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act.[2] Patry also worked as a policy planning advisor to the Register of Copyrights, and held a post as Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.[3] He is also the author of a 7-volume treatise on U.S. copyright law entitled Patry on Copyright, arguably superior in breadth and depth to Nimmer’s Nimmer on Copyright.[4] Patry is currently Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, Inc.