Federal Appeals Court Rules Fair Use May Be Narrowed to Serve Hollywood Profits | Hacker News Reader

Federal Appeals Court Rules Fair Use May Be Narrowed to Serve Hollywood Profits

eff.org

63 pointsaspenmayer13 comments

Congress has the power "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."

It's right there in black and white.

You will never convince a court to expand fair use when it would obviously limit the economic ability of the largest creators to continue creating works. This was a ridiculous case to begin with.

Original title was too long:

Federal Appeals Court Rules That Fair Use May Be Narrowed to Serve Hollywood Profits

This obviously isn't on you, but that title is terrible. The article itself says the case is actually about whether describing how to circumvent digital restrictions management is protected speech, with an appellate courting ruling that it is not. That's a much bigger blow to our rights than anything regarding fair use - fair use inherently requires a fuzzy judgement, while speech should be quite clear cut.

I agree the title is sub-optimal, but I don't think it's terrible. It needs to appeal to a broad audience that may not know what DRM is, let alone how to remove it. In return for less accuracy, it becomes more understandable and meaningful to the average person.

Why are the vast majority of people so apathetic about this? I really don't understand why it's just a bunch of DRM activists, and a bunch of people who make a shit ton of money by using the law like this are the only ones that care. Why is the huge mass in the middle so disinterested?

Says nothing about appealing to scotus. Maybe they're still thinking about it.

If they were to ask SCOTUS to decide the case, what do you think the current SCOTUS would do?

I don't know. Maybe it is a coin toss. The CAFC is famous for being pro patent (idk about copyright). SCOTUS has actually been kind of reasonable, since Eldred which they messed up.

Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003) [1] was bad enough (applying the 1988 copyright term extension to existing copyrighted works, including those about to enter the public domain), but there was also the Golan v. Holder (2012) [2] ruling allowing the same term extension to apply to foreign-made works that had already entered the public domain in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_v._Holder

The bulk of the claims will more then likely come from Hollywood film studios.

What a shit tier ruling. Fair use should be expanded, not curtailed.

I very much agree that fair use should be expanded, but I don't think it's the job of the court to do that. They are supposed to interpret the law, not write it.

Fair enough. But the way the ruling danced around free speech and instead ruled that fair use was really about ‘conduct’ is not something I agree with. That distinct category seems invented to curtail speech and the distinction between the two seems intentionally vague. Where is the line between process and speech? It seems to me that it is ‘conduct’ in this case because it involves technology, which seems like a terrible precedent to set.

‘Can’t say ____ online, as online speech is mediated via computer and is therefore conduct.’

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