Re: DEADLINE approaches to tell Copyright Office you want to use your fair use rights; my example

From: Leo Enticknap <[email protected]>

Henry M. Taylor asks:

"Does this potentially also apply outside the US as far as, for instance, the use of dvds of North American origin (code 1) are concerned?"

This is potentially a difficult one.  US law theoretically only applies to acts committed on US soil. It's worth flagging up the Berne Convention, an international agreement which states, basically, that the duration of copyright in a work as defined by the laws of the country in which it was created is applied in all other signatory countries to the treaty.  In a film made in the UK, it's 70 years from the date of first public screening, or the end of the year in which the last one of these four dies - director, screenwriter, cinematographer or composer of music specially produced for the film.  This means that in the case of a film made in Britain, it enters the public domain after 70 years, even in Berne Convention signatory countries where, had it been produced there, the duration of copyright is longer.

However, the legal basis of that is country A agreeing to enact country B's laws in certain circumstances in respect of what goes on in country A's soil.  There is also another issue, namely extradition agreements.

A recent example is the case of Gary McKinnon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Mckinnon), who the United States want to extradite from the United Kingdom, for alleged offences committed over the Internet.  He is accused of having attacked computers physically located in the US, but over the wire from UK soil.  McKinnon has never set foot in the United States.

As far as copyright is concerned, Section 35 of the UK's Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act provides an educational use exemption.  In effect, it means that I can screen the content of a retail-purchased DVD or BD in the classroom, as long as it's in a recognised educational institution, as part of a scheduled teaching session and only enrolled students and their instructor(s) are present in the room.  However, if I did this with recordings I'd purchased in another country, the act of screening them constituted an offence in that other country (i.e. their copyright law did not have an educational use exemption) and they tried to extradite me on the grounds that the law of the country in which the recording was published should prevail, would I find myself being put on a plane in handcuffs?  In particular, and as Julian Assange has found out the hard way, the European Union's arrest warrant system means that you can be extradited from one EU member country to another with no questions asked, no requirement that the alleged criminal act be an offence in the country you're being extradited from (only in the one you're being extradited to), and no obligation on the part of the requesting country to provide any substantive evidence of the offence.

I guess any cross-border copyright case would hinge on the provisions of any extradition treaty between country A and country B.  Although showing a DVD in a classroom in contravention of the copyright law of the country in which you bought it isn't likely to be high on the list of law enforcement agencies' priorities, and therefore I suspect that the likelihood of anything happening is very, very low, I wouldn't totally rule the possibility of an extradition attempt out, possibly precipitated by an effective politician being lobbied effectively.  Ever since the McKinnon case hit the headlines, I have only screened DVDs and BDs in my own teaching that were actually published (i.e. not imported from an Ebay reseller without the permission of the original publisher in a foreign country) and which I purchased (and have kept the receipts to prove) in the UK, just in case...

Leo
-- 
*Dr. Leo Enticknap
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