Dowbrigade

Last summer I had a law student named Sosumi. Really. This summer
I have again been spending 4 hours a day in a basement room with a dozen
lawyers, an obligation
which
has
but
three
more
days to
run and which I will miss as much as I celebrate its ending. As a result,
I have
been thinking a lot about legal matters. Specifically, about the possible
ramifications of publishing all of this bizarre shit on a server at the
Harvard Law School.

As a non-lawyer, I am the first to admit when my ignorance matches my
interest and ask for advice and counsel from the experts. Which I plan
to do on
Thursday at the next meeting of the Open Blogger’s Workgroup, where there
are many wise minds and experienced web-publishers. In the meantime,
I am blogging this as a way to organize my thoughts and solicit additional
opinions.

Like most educators I habitually claim blanket absolution in the Fair
Use exception to exclusive rights. Between that and Dave’s E-TAG site
license
(Everything That’s Available on Google), I felt pretty secure. But spending
the summer with the devious minds of a group of lawyers has instilled
the fear of God in me, and so I recently ventured into the actual code
referring
to "Fair use":

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

Now, returning to number 2, please check out this hypothetical concerning
linking to or independently posting (copying) copyright material of various
"natures."

Q: What would be the hypothetical liability of an innocent (until proven
guilty) academic blogger who appropriated the following materials:

[Before going any further with these examples let me categorically state
for the record that I have never personally engaged in any of the activities
described therein and that the specific instances are wholly fictitious
and made up]

A: Copying the lead paragraph of a newspaper article from a public access
site and posting it with a sentence or two of commentary and a link to
the complete article.

B: Copying significant portions, with commentary, of a subscription-based
internet publication like the New York Times. (Does it make a difference
if I grab the article off of their RSS feed? Doesn’t its presence on the
RSS feed indicate they WANT people to repost?)

C: Copying and linking to an article in a for-pay subscription publication
like the Chronicle of Higher Ed, which I have accessed through Lexis-Nexis,
to which I have access through my University’s site license.

D: Copying a photo from a news source like MSNBC. Copying a photo from
Google image search. (Does it make a difference if I copy the Google thumbnail
-which is often just the right size- and not the "original" image in situ?)

E: Publicly available documents like Press Releases, court records or financial
filings.

I would really be interested in what people who know more about this stuff
than I do think about these cases. Of course, it’s probably already too
late for me. Actually, I am waiting for the RIAA to come break my door
down. I figure I owe them a little over $1 Billion dollars and they could
lock me up for 20,000 years.