At 2004-04-20 01:02:05 +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > You buy a K.L.Saigal song from iTunes [...and convert it to MP3]. > > Is it not an example of fair use? > > No. It is not. If you are using "fair use" as "the Doctrine of Fair > Use", in copyright law, this is not fair use.
It may not be, but that seems irrelevant in this case. The question here is not one of fair use or copyright law, but about the rights one has to use something that has been paid for, and more importantly, about rights that can or cannot be withdrawn by the copyright holder as a part of the licensing agreement for a copyrighted work. The law is not nearly as clear on that issue as it may be about the fair use of copyrighted works (which you may not have paid for). For example, the ruling of the Norwegian Supreme Court in the decss case says that if you buy a DVD, you get to do things to it that the MPAA may not like. On the other hand, there are contrary rulings from other courts on similar questions. I expect a fairly good case could be made in defence of converting songs to MP3 after buying them, as long as you're not breaking some OTHER laws in the process, for example by distributing the resulting MP3s (which is a copyright violation, although the conversion is not). This is why the DMCA sucks: it makes the reverse-engineering and conversion illegal too. But the DMCA is hardly established legal practice. > Please, folks, we jump on people who post technical questions without > googling. Why not google before one discusses the law? Good point. And the first thing the wannabe-lawyer crowd should Google for is a more suitable forum for this discussion, because this thread has long since ceased to be a "fair use" of the ilugd list. -- ams _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
