Re: Installing Xy under 32-bit Win; Manual; ANSI

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

Let me rephrase that. If there was no copyright owner around to complain,
then I think it would be fair use to copy J.D. Salinger's works.

I'm talking about a situation in which a work has been abandoned, is out of
print, and it is not possible to find the copyright owner even after
reasonable efforts.

I think that in those cases you can make a presumption that the author
would not have objected to having the work reprinted. This is an ethical
judgment, not a legal judgment.

(Of course the Salinger case is unusual in that commercial value wasn't an
issue. Saligner just didn't want his early stories in the Saturday Evening
Post republished.)

BTW, the National Writers Union was receiving royalties from international
copyright payments to writers, and in many cases they were unable to locate
the copyright owner, who in one case was due $20,000. They asked me not to
publicize this at the time, because one of their arguments in the
then-upcoming Tasini case was that it wouldn't be difficult to locate
writers for permission. But sometimes you can't locate the owner of a
copyright.

Sometimes the author is dead, and has no heirs, and would have been happy
to know that his work would have been printed after his death, rather than
be forgotten.

Why make the presumption that the untraceable author wouldn't want it
reprinted? Why not make the presumption that the author would want it
reprinted?

Norman

At 10:15 PM 8/15/02 -0800, J. R. Fox wrote:
>
>Norman Bauman wrote:
>
>> Copying abandoned software and manuals is fair use. If J.D. Salinger wasn't
>> around to complain, it would be fair use to copy his works too.
>
>Not really. His "heirs & assigns" (as contracts and the law often reads)
would
>doubtless have something to say about that.
>
>Jordan
>
>

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Norman Bauman
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