Marc,If your theory were correct I would not have prevailed in the case I described. Copyright protects ownership and it doesn't matter if a person publishes their work or not. It doesn't matter if the owner makes the work available and then makes it unavailable. In fact, licensing preserves a copyright owners ability to make work available for a certain time and then stop a person from using that work if new negotiations for a fee fail after the initial license term ceases. The concept of abandonment does not apply to copyright. Even if it did, the Kittredge plans have not been abandoned.
Realistically, using a whole work would easily be shown to be nothing more than copying the work which is exactly what copyright laws were created to prevent.
Jon On 5/6/2012 11:10 AM, Marc de Piolenc wrote:
I've been having this discussion for decades.One of the key tests used by the courts to determine fair use is whether or not the copying harms the copyright holder. If the copyright holder is making no effort to make his work available, he cannot argue that he is harmed when it is reproduced by others. So no, the law doesn't explicitly require a copyright holder to keep his work on the market, but it doesn't lock that work up if the copyright holder doesn't keep it in print.Many people and even institutions who ought to know better think there is an arbitrary, statutory limit to how much of a work can be copied under Fair Use. Not true. If copying the whole work passes the courts' four-point test, it's still fair use.My copyrights pages is here: http://archivale.com/weblog/?p=527 Marc On 5/6/2012 6:11 AM, Jon Wallace wrote:Well, no, that's a misinterpretation of fair use in my opinion. There's no encumbrance on a copyright owner to make their works available to anyone. Fair use is a concept, not a distinct set of rules, and therefore open to interpretation by a court. In general, fair use is accepted as meaning utilization a minor segment of a larger piece of work.
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