I am a third complete nerd, who is attending a meeting tomorrow about whether librarians are allowed to print out copies for students who can't get into their e-reserves without first checking with the registrar to see if they are registered in the class! 'Cause the evil evil piracy of articles on post-communist Russia by undergraduates is ruining the country, I tells ya.

Also relating Top Chef, I would love to see the word amuse-bouche eliminated from restaurant lexicon. It is not an expression the French use and it sounds ridiculous.

Point me to the hard and fast rules within that statute, though, Trudy. Fair use laws are vague, and deliberately so. The so-called "rules" that "everyone knows" (parody, news-for-news, etc), are gentlemen's agreements, not law.

It's not hard and fast rules, its guidelines used to determine a judgment. Fair use IS determined on an case-by-case basis, but the determination is based on statute .

It's not so much "gentleman's agreement" as it is "precedent" . The statute IS worded vaguely, and like any vaguely worded statue, case-law in significant in determining how it is applied.

'Cause the evil evil piracy of articles on post-communist Russia by undergraduates is ruining the country, I tells ya.

adds flea to list of those perpetrating the post - Communist ideals.

Fourth nerd. I'm the sort under whose rubric permission is being requested when it's decided that fair use does not apply, and partly helping to decide what is and what isn't fair use.

My company gave me ground rules for excerpt size (since we're a for-profit company, most of the rest of the allowance criteria don't vary), but other companies I've worked for gave me different ground rules. Everybody agrees that there are ground rules, however, so if George Lucas tried to sue my company over 1 line of reprinted dialogue, he'd probably get laughed out of court.

Count me as another nerd, because we've had writers fired for lifting chunks of legal texts wholecloth and putting them into their own articles/books that we end up publishing and getting sued over from the original authors, so all of this copyright law info is fascinating to me!

it's not the case that there's no room for case precedent in determining what's fair use.

I didn't say that, nor did I mean to imply it. (Hell, fair use law is nothing but case precedent. Which is why it's so slippery.)

I didn't say that, nor did I mean to imply it. (Hell, fair use law is nothing but case precedent. Which is why it's so slippery.)

Fair enough, I thought you were saying that anything beyond the statute was equivalent to a handshake agreement. If it's case precedent, it's law, though admittedly the widely varying factual situations of each case make it hard (but not impossible) to say whether any particular precedent will control any particular subsequent case.

Oh, the joy of convincing editors that, yes, we will actually have to pay to use those just-right photos in components that we're selling, even if they are able to find similar in people's private online photo albums with a google search while writing manuscript. I push so hard for royalty-free images it's not even funny.

It's official. Democrats control both houses of Congress.

Don't frak it up. The next time it may not be fixable.

I'm not entirely convinced it's fixablethis time, but at least we seem to have put the brakes on before too many people started wearing jackboots. It may take a decade or more to repair our international reputation, a lifetime or more to sort out the long-term debt issues, and we still have the inmates running the asylum as far as foreign policy, the military, and civil services are concerend.

Daniel Baldwin booked for Grand Theft Auto.

They're using live-action footage instead of computer graphics now? t /smartass

meeting tomorrow about whether librarians are allowed to print out copies for students who can't get into their e-reserves

That's going to be every bit as fun as it sounds, isn't it?