Just for clarification purposes, since copyright law seems to be among the most misunderstood and asked about items.
Any chance the IRS had a hand in drafting copyright laws?
Well, part of the reasons for the misunderstanding is that the law itself has changed over the last fifty years or so, and changed in significant ways.
Part of the reasons for those changes is that copyright law in the U.S. and in Europe are not the same -- thus for a long time things that were in the public domain here might very well still be under copyright in Europe.
That might not make much difference for a book, back in 1922. But once you get into the latter part of the twentieth century, and especially into the world of media that have substantial international presence and remain in constant release (especially after the advent of television) -- that situation became more and more problematic for everybody.
We needed to move in a direction of consistent international copyright -- and since European copyright laws were substantially more generous than ours -- our laws began to shift in the direction of granting longer copyright terms -- and also *back-granting* rights to those works that had gone into the public domain.
So you had a situation when works that had gone public actually reverted back to being under copyright (you want to talk about a mess).
As for exceptions -- they haven't changed much, but what constitutes a valid use of of one of those exceptions is always going to open to interpretation.
Carol Burnett always used to do those movie spoofs on her show -- which were obviously supposed to fall under the fair use parody exception.
Except in one case (I forget which) somebody sued, claiming that the parody took too much -- that it was too close to the original to qualify for the fair use exception and they won and the show had to pay.
So the line is never absolute and it is never obvious when you cross it -- until you do.
That, ultimately, is always what the courts are going to be for.
NMS
