Comment on Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books
lud@lemm.ee 3 weeks agoNotwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
I’m no lawyer, but I can’t really find a way that fair use is applicable in this case. Also point 4 is taken into consideration here. And no I obviously don’t agree that games shouldn’t be allowed in libraries. The law should be changed. I just don’t see how fair use is relevant.
reddig33@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
See also first sale doctrine:
“Lending of physical books held by the library is permitted under the first sale doctrine. In other instances, such as making copies of articles and checking them out to students, libraries may rely on fair use to justify course reserves. A recent landmark case related to electronic reserves is Cambridge v. Patton, in which a group of publishers sued Georgia State University for their liberal e-reserves policy. The courts held GSU to be the prevailing party, finding fair use in the majority of alleged infringements”
guides.library.oregonstate.edu/…/libraries#:~:tex….
See also Ben Franklin:
smithsonianmag.com/…/how-ben-franklin-invented-li…
lud@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Interesting.
If you click the first link under :
www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#109
You get a legal text which is almost completely unreadable to me.
But the law explicitly mentions video games:
Do I understand the section above that? Hell no. It’s in a foreign language to me (literally and figuratively).
I feed the entire section to chatGPT and asked it about libraries and video games. It says that video games generally aren’t allowed to be lend at libraries. It’s AI so take it with a grain of salt but to be fair LLMs are pretty good at analysing large amounts of text like this. But if you can read it, I encourage you to do that instead.