APOLOGIA PRO webpage SUA

[Brian Stonehill Media Studies Pomona College]

Steven Weisenburger (ENG012 at ukcc.uky.edu) has issued a discursive challenge to
the legality of certain materials appearing on the home page, a challenge I
feel obliged to take up.

2 epigraphs:

"once a new technology [such as the video recorder] is widespread, and
individuals get accustomed to using it for free, it is virtually impossible to
get Congress to prohibit its use."
      -- Paul Goldstein, _Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial
Jukebox_ (Hill and Wang, 1995, as quoted by Jonathan Yardley, _Washington
Post_, 1/11/95, C2)

"Fascinating topic, literary theft."
       -- Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to _Slow Learner_ (1984), p. 16.

discussion, principles:

What prompted Pynchon's comment, and prompted the publication of _Slow Learner_
itself, was the clearly illegal sale, i.e.,  for money, of pirated editions of
Pynchon's early stories.

The legal status of intellectual property on the Internet is blurry at the
edges, perhaps, but the basic distinction between fair use and protected
matierial is essentially a clear one.  As the law is currently (and locally)
understood, material that has previously been published under copyright may be
quoted in fair use in multimedia applications as long as the following three
necessary conditions are met:

1)  The quotation may not appear without permission in a work that is sold in
support of a for-profit venture.

2)  The quotation may not comprise the entirety of a copyrighted work.

3)  The quotation must not usurp the market for the copyrighted work.

On the Pynchon home page, for example, you will not find stories reproduced
that, to our knowledge, are available for sale in copyrighted editions (e.g.,
nothing from _Slow Learner_).  If the specific back issue of Cornell's
undergraduate literary magazine _Epoch _ were in print and for sale, you would
not find "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" on our tendril of the World Wide Web.

We've already seen chunks of our own stuff from the Pynchon home page show up
on other people's web pages.  Who lives by fair use on the web gets spread
around by it!

There were other reasons, by the way, that kept us from putting Pynchon's
picture up there.

Steven Weisenburger also said:

>if one's got the time to actually sit at one's keyboard and ener the
>whole dang article one needs to get a life, I suspect . . .

This is true in my case, Steve -- but I'd rather the few thousand people who
now know it kept mum about it...

Cheers,  Brian