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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 4951749" data-attributes="member: 15538">Copyright exists to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," according to our Constitution. Any right of that creator is secondary to that purpose. That is the basis of copyright law in the US. In France, for instance, "moral rights" of creators are stronger and the situation may be different, but in the US, copyrights are always balanced against the public good. Thus, if a work is simply made unavailable, limited copying can be argued as fair use. The "purpose and character" of casual file sharing is clearly not commercial; the "nature of the copyrighted work" in this case would be games that people want to play; the "amount of work" would in this case be a weakness in the argument, since the amount is the whole book; and the "effect upon the potential market" is essentially nil, since many older works are not going to be reprinted and it is doubtful that these copies will supercede later versions. In short, the case for infringement rests almost solely on the wholesale copying and not on any consequences of the copyring.I'm not suggesting anyone go out and make or distribute unauthorized copies of things simply because they are out-of-print. But if a product is truly unavailable, because it is a 30 year old product, out of print, rare, and abandoned by its copyright holder, such that a person could literally not pay for the item in any reasonable fashion, then the infringement case looks pretty weak. If the publisher merely wishes to squelch the work, that is simply not the intent of the law. It would be far less of a problem, if we did not live in an era when "limited" copyright durations seem to get longer and longer. Once upon a time, after 28 years, or 56, that was it, the work went into the public domain. So far the Supreme Court has held that retroactive and long durations are still "limited" but I wonder how far that can be pushed. Unlimited copyright would, of course, be unconstitutional.And thus I conclude by observing that much of the copyright "problem" arises precisely because of the self-interested lobbying of various media groups. If copyrights were of a reasonable duration we wouldn't be arguing would to do about 30 year old abandonware in the first place.</blockquote>

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