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Just to clarify, the "fair" in "fair use" is not really in the sense of whether the use is fair and just. e.g. it's not legally valid to argue "I paid for this
by danso 7y ago
Just to clarify, the "fair" in "fair use" is not really in the sense of whether the use is fair and just. e.g. it's not legally valid to argue "I paid for this audiobook, and I did all the work to transcribe it, and I'm not profiting from it. It's fair use, i.e. not unfair to anyone else"
Fair use is primarily about transformative work, e.g. how much copyrighted material is it "fair" for someone to copy and reuse in order to create a transformative work (e.g. parody or critique), without having to compensate the copyright owner.
Your example involves reproducing the entirety of an intellectual work onto a different medium. That's not a transformative work in the context of fair use. And IANAL, but as long as the copyright owner is making money from selling separate text and audio copies, I don't see how creating your own print copy via transcription, ostensibly because you didn't want to buy it from the publisher, is technically legal if for some reason it became a legal case.
Of course, when it comes to the real world, your personal transcription is protected by the fact that no one knows or cares about it :)
- prepend 7y agoI disagree a bit with your definition of fair use. Fair use is a bit a hodgepodge, I think IANAL, but the “four factors [0] #4 is the use’s limitation on creating value from the original work. It seems to me that creating captions from an audiobook in no way limits the copyright holder from selling more audiobooks. There’s also a factor on profit/non-profit uses that doesn’t hold up with amazon providing it, but could if it’s not a sold feature or is provided through an OSS plugin. The other factors are amount and nature. Since it’s the whole work that seems to go against fair use and the nature doesn’t seem to apply. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
- danso 7y agoI didn't mean to imply my comment gave good coverage of the topic, just wanted to point out that "fair use" is focused on finding a balance between respecting copyright while protecting the freedom to make transformative works. It was definitely a nitpick comment on my part, with little real-world relevance to the original comment because it's inconceivable his personal-transcript would be legally challenged. And because it's so much work to manually-transcribe, to the point where he's likely to make mistakes and deliberate alterations and additions of his own, it'd be even more work to argue that it wasn't transformative, nevermind that it had any profit impact whatsoever.