koreth@panarthea.ebay.sun.com (Steven Grimm) (12/24/89)
What do the copyright laws have to say about transmitting small excerpts from
a piece of music? I am pretty sure it's legal to quote a few paragraphs from
a book/magazine for review or discussion purposes; is it legal to digitize a
few seconds of music, for the same purpose?
The reason I ask is that recently, I've been talking to some people on the
net about a couple of musicians I like a lot. I don't have a musical back-
ground, though, so I don't know the terminology to describe the music. What
I'd like to do is play a CD into a Sparcstation here, uuencode the sound,
and mail it off to the other parties (assuming they have similar equipment
for playing back the sound.) If it's legal to do that, I foresee many such
excerpts showing up on the net as well, since digitized sound compresses
well enough to stick into an article without overloading the net.
---
" !" - Marcel Marceau
Steven Grimm Moderator, comp.{sources,binaries}.atari.st
koreth@ebay.sun.com ...!sun!ebay!korethbriang@bari.Sun.COM (Brian Gordon) (12/27/89)
In article <35021@grapevine.uucp> koreth@panarthea.ebay.sun.com (Steven Grimm) writes: >What do the copyright laws have to say about transmitting small excerpts from >a piece of music? I am pretty sure it's legal to quote a few paragraphs from >a book/magazine for review or discussion purposes; is it legal to digitize a >few seconds of music, for the same purpose? > [...] Fascinating question. /* #include (not_a_lawyer.h) */ Once upon a time, the rule for having to pay for air-play was "8 bars or more", nice and cut-and-dry. Then it went to "enough to be recognizable", which can vary from 3 notes to a page. Courts held, eventually, that 8 bars was always enough to be recognized. I suspect that a little (4 bars?) for the purposes you describe would be deemed "fair use", and legal. Enough to impart "the flavor" is probably not, since that is presumably what is copyrighted. Of course, don't expect to see much respect for copyrights on usenet -- until the ax falls the first time. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | Brian G. Gordon briang@Corp.Sun.COM (if you trust exotic mailers) | | ...!sun!briangordon (if you route it yourself) | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
boswell@rex.cs.tulane.edu (Albert Boswell) (01/06/90)
In article <35021@grapevine.uucp> koreth@panarthea.ebay.sun.com (Steven Grimm) writes: >What do the copyright laws have to say about transmitting small excerpts from >a piece of music? I am pretty sure it's legal to quote a few paragraphs from >a book/magazine for review or discussion purposes; is it legal to digitize a >few seconds of music, for the same purpose? > >The reason I ask is that recently, I've been talking to some people on the >net about a couple of musicians I like a lot. I don't have a musical back- >ground, though, so I don't know the terminology to describe the music. What >I'd like to do is play a CD into a Sparcstation here, uuencode the sound, >and mail it off to the other parties (assuming they have similar equipment >for playing back the sound.) If it's legal to do that, I foresee many such >excerpts showing up on the net as well, since digitized sound compresses >well enough to stick into an article without overloading the net. > It seem to my that when copies of records or CDs are made using ordinary magnetic tape, some quality of the music is lost and the result is a less than authenic reproduction. I've never seen anything wrong in this and besides, tape quality seems to diminish rather quickly in comparison to originals. However, when the discussion involves the extraction and re- production of exact digital data files, the situation is quite different obviously. If the equipment of which you speak is capable of transfering this data to some digital medium which can then be distributed -- you can believe it will happen and then there's a problem. Interesting question -- and one that should be discussed more often I think - ETHICAL USE OF COMPUTERS!!!!! Anyone else ????? -AB