content and copyright

Making single copies of newspaper articles for personal use is NOT copyright infringement.

 

hey, conveniently, i'm in my last semester of law school and guess what class i just started taking last week: copyright!

yeah, so i've only had one day of class and only read about 50 pages of the casebook, but kinko's is correct in that it's a copyright violation.

obviously no one is going to stop you from making the copies yourself, although theoretically the copyright owner could file an infringement lawsuit. (copyright is governed by title 17 of the US Code if you want to look it up. you can google it.)

and sorry JR, here in this country there is no statutory exception for personal use. at least not that i've come across yet. the statutory exceptions are for things like use in libraries, "interpreting" for the blind, etc.

but again, this is where we see the disconnect between reality and the real world. no one would ever institute an infringement action if you made a copy of an article. the costs would far outweigh any potential benefits.

so basically kinko's is just covering its ass. damn lawyers...

 

This should have been a Seinfeld episode.

 

OR Curb Your Enthusiasm

 

There are, however, statutory exceptions in copyright laws for fair use, which is open to several definitions, but, if you are only copying a small portion of the paper's content and do not plan on using it for financial gain or are not causing any harm to the copyright owners' ability to make profit from the material, then you could have a legitimate claim for fair use. Not that I think it would come into play very often at Kinko's. How can you get through college without making copies of published material at Kinko's?

 

I highly encourage this practice. It's not stealing or misappropriation if you don't give a fuck.

 

I don't think Kinko's is saying you can't do it...they're saying they won't.

 

Fixed.

 

Yep. That's what they're doing.

Still annoying as fuck, though.

 

That's why some freelancers won't sign the paper's standard work-for-hire agreement, replacing it with one in which the paper only gets first-use rights, after which possession reverts to the photographer. More power to 'em.

 

another thing to note is that my a few of my clips are bigger than 8.5x11 so I asked the customer service woman (this question is what prompted the whole thing anyway) if there was a way I could preview the copy to see if I had resized it correctly and she said "no". Seriously, in this world of technology where phones play mp3s and have MS Office, there's no way to see a preview of a copy? I hate Kinkos.

 

bizarre. this is twilight zone stuff. amazing.