klapt.net

Kürzlich hatte ich Anlass und Gelegenheit, mich wieder mal aufs Land zu begeben. Aufs schweizerische Land. Laut NZZ am Sonntag ist dort ja das Heil zu finden, “Chancen für den 1,70-Meter-Mann und die Kleidergrösse-40-Frau”.

Weil ich kein Mann bin, der Autos repariert (auch die gibt’s nur auf dem Land, so die NZZ), stieg ich in den Zug, setzte mich ans Fenster und wurde belehrt: “dies ist kein Lungenzug”. Ich staunte. Offenbar fahren sonst Lungenzüge auf den Gleisen auf dem Land…

Der Nicht-Lungenzug fuhr gemächlich durch Wiesen und Industrieareale und hielt ab und an an, in Orten mit verwirrlichen Namen (in Schottikon wird wohl kein Wisky gebraut und kein Haggis gejagt) und eigenwilligen Wegweisern “zum Aussendepot”.

Dann war ich angekommen und spazierte durch das Dorf. Es gab eine Kirche, eine Bank, wohl auch ein Bordell, einen Wohnblock, wo wohl die Ausländer wohnen, und einen Polizeiposten. Er trägt die Inschrift: “Wer sät, der erntet”.

"Fair Use" is a concept of US copyright legislation. In essence it is 'any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative" purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work'¹.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association reveals in a study² about $4.5 trillion of the revenue generated in the US, or 18 percent, and about 17.3 million jobs rely on the fair use exceptions. This revenue is generated by industries such as³:

• manufacturers of consumer devices that allow individual copying of copyrighted programming;
• educational institutions;
• software developers; and
• internet search and web hosting providers.

The figure looks gigantic, and the temptation is high to argue for a small share of revenue for the creators of all that content used under fair use exceptions. However, the exceptions of fair use make quite many economic activities only possible, e.g. software development, which in many cases requires the making of temporary copies of existing programs to facilitate the programming of interoperability, making temporary copies of TV programmes to watch them at a later point in time, or even browsing the web, which requires temporary cache copies of websites on the rendom access memory of the computer — activities that would be extremely hard to monitor in order to collect resonable compensation for the use of copyrighted content, let alone the difficulties of establishing corresponding licensing agreements. Thus, establishing the fair use exemptions in 1976 was a vital ingredient for many industries to grow.

More importantly, it is worthwhile noticing, that it is not only copyright protection that stimulates innovation, creativity and eventually business. Obviously, the "fair use" exemption in the U.S. even outnumbers the potential of the 'copyright industry'.⁴ I should add, however, that relying on a fair use exemption requires copyright protection to be established in the first place — and this not in a narrow sophistic sense but in order to make the creation of content viable at all.

1. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html [↩]
2. available online at http://www.ccianet.org/artmanager/publish/news/First-Ever_Economic_Study_Calculates_Dollar_Value_of.shtml [↩]
3. p. 6, 18-39 and appendix II of the report [↩]
4. according to the IIPA-report (http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/20070130-report.pdf), 'In 2005, the estimated value added for the total copyright industries rose to $1,388.13 billion ($1.38 trillion) or 11.12% of U.S. GDP.' [↩]