RE: Fwd: FNV-RIAA IS CRACKING DOWN

["Stephen P. Goodman" <sgoodman@earthlight.net>]

Sounds like a bunch of folks wrapping themselves in the term Fair Use, as
if, once someone else creates an original work, anyone has the right to use
it as they see fit, as if all defaults to the public domain, as a result of
publishing.

If this newsletter is mainly populated by people who sample for the content
of their material, it'd be a surprise, as I've seen enough informed 
opinions
on the nature of performance to count this newsletter second to Elephant
Talk.  How anyone can pretend that gratis use of material someone else
created (and this is a keyword) is justifiable is beyond me, completely.  
If
the source is public domain, that's fine.  Otherwise, it's just a softening
of that word noone likes to hear, Theft.  Oh, excuse me, "borrowing without
checking".

Putting notices on ones products, when they contain samples, modified from
the source or not, of someone elses work, is just theft with excuses.  How
is that supposed to protect anyone from prosecution for copyright
infringement?

> And anyway, copyright is not necessarily about money.

It is when someone makes money using your material without permission.

> So long as they don't take the
> whole thing, put
> their name at the top in place of yours, and reproduce it
> somewhere else, we
> are fine with this.

How can it be possible that using a section of as opposed to an entire work
exempts one from copyright law?  It's still an unsupportable argument, and
the noise made by the sampling community-at-large still smacks of an airy
justification for being caught with their hands in the jar, as if "the jar
was open!  I smelled the cookies!" is an excuse.

> It's the balancing part of the law, there to prevent some
> entity from stifling further creative developments by
> refusing to allow
> reuse of a particular published work or making it
> unreasonably expensive.
> (That's what Negativland is arguing that the RIAA is doing.)

Like I said.

This is beginning to smell like the PC vs Mac argument, a highly-developed
(though only sporadically active) form of intellectual masturbation.  So
that's all for now, and I'm not Lowell Thomas.

Stephen GoodmanÊ -Ê It's... The Loop Of The Week!
EarthLight StudiosÊ -Ê http://www.earthlight.net/Studios