Copyright

[Shelley Hanson/KlezmerAllThatJazz]

There is one additional factor you have all failed to consider in your very
interesting debate on copyright.

In the United States, and I'm sure in most countries, there is the "Fair Use
Doctrine." Material which is OUT OF PRINT may be duplicated and used for
study. Therefore, a person, say a professor at a university, legally may
xerox an article from a journal and use it for research, or send it to
someone somewhere else (somewhere in nowhere?) who needs it but doesn't have
access to the original.

This means that it is okay to upload a story, AFTER IT IS NOT AVAILABLE IN
STORES. If you wait one month, until the next issue is out, it is legal. But
you CAN NOT do this if someone could still buy it. Remember this is for
study purposes -- you can't be making any money on this. Where Disney could
sue you is if they say they are re-printing this -- this is a little tricky.

Another part of the law says that you can quote short excerpts from
something as part of a scholarly study. So if someone wants to upload, for
instance, some of the censored art which Barks (and others) later changed
when it was reprinted,  it is absolutely legal to upload the original panels
and then the changed ones. So to be safer, you might not want to upload a
whole story all at the same time.

However, if something is still available for purchase and you upload it, you
are violating the law (and hurting the publisher, who may stop publishing
the stories, thus hurting all of us). In the United States, everything is
out of print (this is why there is not a next generation of readers of duck
comics). So I don't think anyone is violating U.S. copyright law doing this,
especially issues from European countries which we can't buy in the U.S., as
long as they wait until the next issue is in the stores. But whether you are
violating your own countries' laws, you will have to check.


Does anyone know when "Somewhere in Nowhere" will be published? Thanks.