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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5369720" data-attributes="member: 82106">Not true. When a potential copyright infringement is being evaluated by the court the issue of value is one of the considerations which is used to evaluate whether or not the use was legitimate. The defendant would simply need to assert that there is a theory under which use is possible and that said use does not present an economic harm to the complainant.Your example wouldn't even make it to court in the US. DISTRIBUTION is in and of itself a key factor. I could make as many copies of copyrighted material as I want as long as I use them myself and don't distribute them. Economic harm is not the ONLY consideration and lack of such is not in and of itself sufficient defense, but it is very certainly a factor. Piling up unauthorized copies of someone else's work in my basement is virtually assured to be found inconsequential. This is in fact why the RIAA's cases against file sharers require some proof that the defendant distributed the work to those not authorized by the copyright holder to have access to it. Invariably in these cases they went to the extent of actually downloading the files from the defendant's computer (or at least parts of them). Without that these cases are at best extremely hard to pursue. Were it as easy as you're making it out to be to establish a violation EULA's and such would hardly exist. It is the very fact that copyright only gives a fairly circumscribed set of rights that content vendors are in the habit of creating additional contractual obligations. In the case of DDI material the EULA/ToS actually gives the end user some additional rights they might not clearly have by law (though they probably do).Again, as this applies to web based content like Compendium the very fact that the data is online implies that the vendor expects it will accessed by software which uses HTTP and other related technologies. That includes things like local caching, proxying, etc which can all result in temporary storage of the material in the course of its use, which has generally been found to be perfectly acceptable. As far as non-US jurisdictions you simply cannot generalize. They DO however typically have provisions analogous to the fair use doctrine available in the US. This is to be expected since most such provisions exist in order to provide a practical balance between the license holder and the consumers and those practicalities are universal.Obviously if you were intending to create some sort of commercial or public non-commercial service that makes use of Compendium data or something similar then you'd be well advised to have a significant legal budget or be prepared to fold up at a moment's notice. Generally that's enough for a company like WotC. They are unlikely to care what individual users do as long as it doesn't negatively impact sales or endanger other business they may want to undertake.</blockquote>

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