CompuServe Messages

Paul: >To be fair, I honestly don't think distribution houses (Paramount, Disney, Columbia, et al) are interested in my 4 second sample of Derrick Flint saying 'an actor as president?' from one of the In Like Flint movies. You can legitimately copy stuff you've purchased (or was distributed to you) for your own use. What they're interested in is protecting their revenue and keeping their property from falling into public domain.< Okay, but what happens when you upload your IN LIKE FLINT clip, even if you *don't* mean to sell it but just put it there to share? In a sense, the property then falls into the public domain, which is (inferring from your post) a form of copyright violation… Or did I get that right? >I've gotten e-mail from people I don't know; who've seen a video message clip from me to another user; who forwarded it to someone else. I have the right to distribute my likeness but others do not. This, I believe, will put a subtle wrench in the works of "narrowcasting' you speak of, Patrick. Getting 1 subscription to a newsletter; then photocopying it and sending it around the office is illegal. It is also narrowcasting. But passing around that single copy you paid for is perfectly legal. For this reason, I don't think 'broad' or 'narrow' will be an issue in the future. It's the 'casting' part that will be the issue. < So forwarding a vidclip you've sent to someone else *is* a copyright violation (same as Xeroxing a newsletter and sending cc's around the office, even though that's done routinely in large corporations?). After all, it's not exactly like you can hand a vidclip around like you can a copy of a magazine or newsletter… I'm interested because a e-mail friend of mine in Norway is trying to persuade me to try distributing some DTP work I do for my job electronically and selling *that* instead of selling it as paper media (which is what my boss does now). I've been reluctant, since I know how easy it would be for someone to download it, copy the file(s) and ship it on to a friend, who'll ship it on to a friend, and so on, and so on, and so on… She argues that you can do that w/paper media as well–my point is, yes you can, but it takes a certain amount of time and skill to plagarize paper media, while anyone w/a computer can copy electronic media… Any thoughts? Tim