With all of these subjective views and court rulings on what copyright is and what it’s protecting, what am I supposed to do as an individual? I break copyright laws on a regularly and so do you.  Music, movies, software, etc., it’s all being done while the courts hammer out common law definitions for copyright infringement, while aided by a just as faulty set of “feel good” guidelines to further murk up any headway.

I understand that law is reactionary and can only apply x amount of hours towards one facet of law, but the internet and its capabilities are moving a little faster than the amount of time it takes a court to shuffle its deck and pull out a judgment. The language usage involving the criteria of the fair-use law is similar to, well, just about any area of law; general, broad, subjective, and malleable.

Maybe not so much malleable as magical. Referring to the criterion nature of a copyrighted work, what aspect am I looking for to define the work’s nature? Could it be the demographic, the genre, the overlying theme, or the message interpreted by the audience? I guess it depends on the defendant’s first impressions in the court and the panel of judge’s gut feeling because there is no way to pinpoint their logic from the scattered rulings throughout the fair-use law’s existence.

It’s a human system and humans have faults, but the lineup of cases throughout history and the judge’s statements about their decisions make them look like fools. They jump in and out of convenient guidelines, back to fair-use law, then copyright law, back to guidelines, and on and on until a justified decision can be pieced together. The guidelines provide and excellent detour to nonsense. Um, let’s see, what number sounds good for the amount of pages a teacher can copy or the amount of time you can play a musical piece in a social setting? What’s your favorite number? Mine is ten. Now where to plug that meaningless and arbitrary number into a slot? I’m going with the percentage a teacher can copy from a newspaper. Man, these guidelines are a piece of cake. I think I missed my calling as a lawmaker.

Now I’m not officially a lawmaker because these guidelines aren’t law, they might as well be though. They are treated that way in the court when they support a decision, while at the same time being curiously scrutinized by the same person who just used them to validate his point. Which is it? Are they made up nonsense or are they a valuable and much needed tool in aiding the courts? No law is perfect, but these guidelines are changing the direction of what fair-use was created to do. Oh wait, I forgot no one’s really sure about that either.  This is awkward. I’m trying to decipher a law using guidelines that want to micromanage professionals and citizens beyond the boundaries of what a courtroom should be worried about. The law is breaking one of its own cardinal sins; laws must be specific and narrow enough in scope to actually make a result and not waste resources over limits on time, quantity, and quality.