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"Mark Burns" <marcus520520@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1124936524.278309.171520@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> You are the attorney.
>
> Please cite a case where someone was prosecuted for copying their OTA
> tape to another tape, CD, or DVD for their private viewing.
You're talking apples and oranges. Whether someone has been sued has
nothing to do with whether the law permits the kind of conduct you've
described.
> I have
> read and seen many cases where people have been charged with illegal
> distribution. I don't doubt that one could be sued, but I doubt that
> even a conservative Supreme Court would condone the invasion of a man's
> castle to wrest a marginal personel memory based upon vague copyright
> claims. And they are just that, claims.
The prohibition on illegal search and seizure contained in the 4th amendment
is a restriction on GOVERNMENT action, not on private action. You most
certainly can be sued for what you do in your home.
Again, you're talking about whether someone would be caught, or whether
someone would be sued -- entirely different questions than whether what
you've advocated is legal. It is not. Period.
>
> Fair Use is an affirmitive defense.
That's right. So?
> There are countless reasons to
> want to maintain a copy of that broadcast. It might be the last
> football game that he and his father watched together. It may be that
> there was someone in the broadcast that he knew. These are personal
> reasons.
None of which are relevant to a fair use defense. Fair use does not
consider why a person wanted to make an unauthorized copy, but how the copy
was used.
> I have no reason why the OP would want to keep an old ABC
> broadcast, and would never pry. Nor would I condemn.
I don't condemn. I merely corrected your erroneous contention, i.e. that
personal use was fair use.
>
> Historicaly, copyright is not the exclusive right to copy material, it
> is the exclusive right to distribute material.
No, historically, it was the exclusive right copy, at in the tradition of US
law which began with the Statute of Anne.
> This goes back to the
> days of the first printing presses.
No, it goes back to the Statute of Anne in 1710, which was a long time after
the invention of printing presses.
> School children used to learn to
> read and write by hand copying copyrighted material from books that
> they could not legally distribute.
You can make up whatever you like, just as you've made up your "personal use
= fair use" doctrine -- it's still incorrect.
>
> Copyright laws were made to serve the public good, not to serve the
> private greed.
Copyright laws were made as an incentive to creation -- it allows authors to
keep the fruits of their intellectual labors, and therefore encourages them
to produce more. In the U.S., copyright is authorized by Article I, Section
8 of the Constitution, which permits Congress, "To promote the progress of
science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and
inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
As I said, you can make up whatever you want, but you're simply incorrect.
> Certainly greed can be a postitive influence on the
> marketplace, but the laws were never meant to create intellectual
> property or condone the hoarding of material from the public.
Completely wrong. What do you think, "exclusive right to their respective
writings" means? An author has an absolute right to withhold material from
the public -- if you think I'm wrong, go down to Blockbusters and try to
rent the film version of Catcher in the Rye. Hint: there's never been one.
> As I
> recall, when "Laurence Of Arabia" was remastered by David Lean back in
> the late 80's, many of the frames used in the mastering process came
> from private copies, and some were unauthorized copies that had been
> released to theatres and never picked back up. The studio had let
> their copies rot in tin cans on the shelf. No one prosecuted those
> private owners, and they had less claim on their material than someone
> who copied an ABC broadcast 20 years ago onto their own video tape.
Ownership of unauthorized copies isn't illegal. Copyright, in the US,
secures for a copyright owner protection against unauthorized copying,
distribution, preparation of derivative works and public performance. See
17 U.S.C. Sec. 106. It is perfectly legal to own unauthorized copies.
>
> Personaly, I wish that everyone was an archivest, at least of those
> things that they found the most dear, for whatever silly human
> sentimental reason. History and posterity are both served by this. I
> sincerely hope that the OP successfully trasfers his tape for whatever
> historical or personal purpose that he has.
Personally, I wish people would stop pretending that their personal biases
and preferences are the law. You can wish whatever you want. Your wishes,
however, are not the law and you really need to stop telling people that
they are.
>
> Transporting ones legally obtained memories from ones own property to
> ones own property is nothing more than ones own business. This is not
> anarchism, it is simply liberty.
And ignoring the law is simply anarchy. And ignorance of the law is . . .
well . . . simply ignorance.
>
> Cheers...
>
> P.S. Isn't there some Latin phrase that says that the law does not
> trifle with trifles?
There are legal maxims for just about everything. How about this one (from
Marbury v. Madison): For every right there is a remedy.
>
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