Fair Use Is Not a Right

The term " fair use " is a wide ranging complex legal doctrine that embraces many kinds of acts. For example, making a backup copy could be fair use but under a different policy basis than making copies for limited educational non-commercial use.

In particular, I'm addressing a previous comment that fair use is not a "right". Well, it is a right insofar as fair use also protects exercise of First Amendment free speech rights. For example, it likely would be fair use to take a political candidate's speech and quote it in whole for the purpose of tearing it apart.

To the topic of file sharing, I left my side chosen as uncommitted because it isn't a yes or no question. Some file sharing purposes fall within fair use while others file sharing purposes do not. The supposedly-rampant wholesale free downloading of music and movies is, in general, stealing -- not fair use.

I am Pro for fair use but also against it, and let me explain what I mean exactly.
A few weeks ago I found out that Google had listed a web page of a blog on top - or should I say - above mine, which was the real article that was stolen from my blog by the owner of the meantioned one. Not only had he stolen my article, but he did not even link back to where he got it from. And Google placed his page on top of mine in the Search results, while one could easily see that his was placed there like 30 hours after it was posted on my blog.

Obviously I reacted upset and sent the arrogant thief an email warning him to immediately delete my post as I am going to place a complaint with Google about it. And I did that on Google's Adsense forum as there is simply no other way to complain properly, except for following the long procedure with sending everything by real mail. Within a few days my post was deleted and the page came under 404 error.

And I am not sure who did it - was it the webmaster of the site, or Google, since it was a blogger blog, a free blog platform owned by Google. In any case when someone uses something of yours - there are enough ways to do this properly. By using a paragraph and link back to the source is one of the acceptable "Fair Use's", which I have no problems with. Anything else - for me at least is a Big NO NO.

Fair Use is a legally viable defense. It is not a 'right'.

Still there have been court cases that have gone to appeals and lost that give consumers the right to time-shifting and make DRM which denies this particular right which has been granted by the courts illegal. This was a case that was already lost with VCR technology and in fact referenced those earlier rulings in dealing with newer technology such as PVR's and DVD rewriters to record TV shows for later viewing.

Imagine that thereare only 100 people on earth. 60 of them do not steal or cheat and 40 do. At this time, stealing and cheating would be wrong. The next day, a natural disaster kills 30 of the 60 people who do not cheat or steal. Now it is morally correct to cheat and steal. Thus, it would be possible to change the moral order of the world to one's view simply by eliminating those who disagree.