My copyright teacher was a wonderful mentor. He taught one of the more interesting classes I took during law school. Did I mention he called on me every day? You might wonder why, if you knew me, and you knew my classmates there would be no question.
In Athens Georgia, I was one of the more liberal students in lawschool. Alright, maybe the most liberal. Professor Patterson had studied the IP clause of the Constitution for many years before I met him. He said it derived from the Brittish statute of Anne. That makes sense. Most US inventions have some roots in our previous traditions.
Unlike the DMCA, he understood the IP clause to be there to benefit the public good. Basically it was his opinion that copyrights existed to enhance public domain, promote learning and secondarily give the author some right. By ensuring a limited monopoly, you would encourage the creation of things that would eventually end up in public domain. In this respect, copyright was never supposed to be like property rights.
It troubles me how far copyright law has gone. I went to Kinkos today and they told me I needed a release from the photographer to print pictures of my own children. Whatever. This isn't the first time Kinko's has given me crap about copyrights. I had gone last year to create an overhead projector page so I could draw a cat in the hat picture on my daughters wall. They told me this was infringment (this would fall into fair use by the way), but because of the litigiousness of all of these people essentially even things you own are off limits for craft projects.
Professor Patterson passed away last year. I miss his thoughts.
http://www.lawsch.uga.edu/jipl/old/vol1/patterson.html
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2 comments:
Nice to meet you, Bruce's wife! Yeah, Kinko's is the worst. I usually make copies at the do-it-yourself Kodak machines at WalGreen's. Only one time did anyone hassle me there, which was pretty funny since the photographer who made the portraits I was copying had probably been dead for 50 years. (I got my copies.)
I used to work at Kinkos, I hated telling people that I couldn't do their stuff for them. It was so silly, but its true, its all the litigiousness that made it so - they have a very strict policy about copyright infringement.
Like the previous poster said, the way around it is to just use the self-serve machines, because then its out of their hands.
Or if you're a teacher, you can sign a waiver that states you're using them for educational purposes - but that wouldn't work for the photographs.
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