Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by o11c 526 days ago
"Making money" does not immediately invalidate fair use, but it does wave a big red flag in the courts' faces.
2 comments

I would be more nuanced on this matter. As I understand, in the US, fair use allows media to write critiques of cultural artefacts (sorry, I cannot think of a better, broad term). For example, you can include small quotes from the film script when writing a critique of it without requiring permission from the owner of the copyright. And, until the World Wide Web arrived to the masses in the mid-1990s, most critiques were published by commercial media outlets, such as a daily newspaper. They were certainly published by commercial, for-profit entities. That said, I think the intent of the fair use is very important to the courts, much more than the entity that is doing the fair use (newspaper, blogger, etc.).

Another weird carve-out for copyright law in the US: parody. Honestly, I don't know if other jurisdictions allow parody in the same protected manner.

> Another weird carve-out for copyright law in the US: parody. Honestly, I don't know if other jurisdictions allow parody in the same protected manner.

Germany: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51a.html (Though this explicit carve-out is a recent development, though generally speaking parodies were allowed even under the previous version of the law.)

Your reference (link) is very impressive. Thank you to share. Honestly, I would struggle to provide the equivalent for US federal law (or court ruling). Are you a lawyer in DACH/Germany? How did you know to find this web page?
> Are you a lawyer in DACH/Germany?

Nope :-), just a normal citizen, but sometimes I am curious enough to look up a law, plus sometimes I need to refer to/look up some law in my day job as a civil engineer, too.

When you need to do that, it's not too hard to stumble upon the existence of that page through some web searches, plus the German Wikipedia often links to that page, too (as well as to some alternative platforms run by private entities, which sometimes provide some added value, e.g. buzer.de provides change history since 2006, too, other pages link relevant court decisions, etc. etc. – but gesetze-im-internet.de is the official page run by the federal government itself).

So you say that, every law is a suggestion depending who's being tried?
Er, what? I'm speaking directly from the law, 17 U.S.C. § 107. It's deliberately written in terms of "factors to consider", rather than absolutes.

> In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

> * the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

> * the nature of the copyrighted work;

> * the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

> * the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.