Copyright law is a hot topic these days, with Google being sued for a BILLION DOLLARS, and a lot of it is a humungous gray area that will be debated forever between duelling attorneys. I bring this up tonight because Grupthink just had our first brush with copyright law, so I thought we should talk about it.

In a nutshell, here’s what happened last week. davidthedrake posted a topic about a news story accompanied by an image from the local newspaper that covered the story. The newspaper asked that the image be removed (both in comments and via our contact form). I spoke with davidthedrake about it and a really smart attorney. In the end we decided it was best to comply with the request, and davidthedrake swapped out the copyrighted image for one covered by a Creative Commons license.
The issue at question is whether the use of the image constituted “Fair Use”, a legal term which means use of copyrighted material for comment or critique (you can read the statute for the real definition). You might notice that Grupthink pages all mention Fair Use at the bottom of the page.

Because the image itself was not the object of comment or critique, an argument for Fair Use might have been tough to defend. And in the absence of a strong Fair Use defense, DMCA requires us to act when copyright holders notify us of things like this.

Grupthink is committed to proper compliance with legal copyright complaints, and also with defending Fair Use by our Grupies. A balancing act? Yes indeed. These issues are sure to come up again, and the more we all understand about what’s legal and what ain’t, the better.

- Jamsterson

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 12:33 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.