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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jaerdaph" data-source="post: 327793" data-attributes="member: 3398">My father was an intellectual property lawyer for IBM for over 30 years. Here's what he told me regarding fair use:It's like buying a CD album. You can copy the CD onto a tape, for example, and play it in your car. That's fair use. What you can't do is make copies of that album on tape (or burn to another CD) for all your friends. You also can't burn CDs off of the one you bought and sell them - that's bootlegging. With a PDF, you can own one copy of the digital file (the CD in the example above), and print out one copy for your use (the tape for your car tapedeck). You can't give copies to all your friends of the digital PDF file or print it out multiple times for each them. Here's where it gets murky: If you own a book, you can loan it to a friend to read. If you own a CD album, you can loan it to a friend to listen to.  Can you loan a PDF, or a PDF printout? Here my dad just kind of smiled and said, hey, I'm retired. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I *think* he was referring to the fact that these legal questions haven't been adequately answered yet.A good rule of thumb: Think of it like software licenses, you know, like for that copy of MS Word you own. You can only have it on one machine if you have one license. But hey, I'm in arts administration, not law, so what do I know? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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