Aperture Aside Photographer's Blog: Recent Comments

Comment on Dan Heller Illuminates the Dark Underside of Our Fair Use Copyright Clause

Aggie Villanueva — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:16:55 GMT

Thankx for your input. That's what this is all about. What does everyone else think about this topic?

Comment on Dan Heller Illuminates the Dark Underside of Our Fair Use Copyright Clause

Debbi — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:03:04 GMT

Dan Heller wrote: "with regards to your desire to quote other peoples' writing--- you can quote any part of their works without permission, provided that what you're quoting is relevant to what you're talking about. In fact, you can quote an entire book, provided you talk about each and every paragraph, or "element" or "style", and so long as "all of it" is necessary in order to express the point."

Um . . . how can I put this delicately? Dan, I think you're wrong. The fair use doctrine is much more complicated than "it's okay to quote someone without permission when it's relevant to your point." Fair use is based on a balancing on various factors, none of which you've cited here, such as nature of the use, (e.g., academic, criticism, nonprofit, etc.), how much of the quoted material you use (yes, the amount of the total material used factors into this), and how much your use affects the value (to the original author from sales, etc.) of the material quoted from. There are other factors that I can't remember, but one thing's for sure, you can't just copy someone else's work in its entirety and call it fair use simply by virtue of inserting some discussion here and there about "element" and "style."

The doctrine just isn't that simple. Even copyright lawyers have a hard time grappling with it.

Comment on Aggie's Year Starts With a Photographic Bang

Sharon Van Lieu — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:55:07 GMT

Congratulations! Your work is lovely. I enjoyed all of these, especially "Aspen Stand", "I am all colors" and "And Through the Woods".

Best wished,

Sharon

Comment on Shoot the Sunset

Skippy — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:12:26 GMT

Aggie, very interesting. You have a very busy mind. Glad I came for a visit, thanks for the invite.
Peace, Harmony & Laughter

Comment on Dan Heller Illuminates the Dark Underside of Our Fair Use Copyright Clause

Helen — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:34:13 GMT

WOW, this was amazingly helpful. I am going to go buy his books now.