Peter Olson suggests a couple interesting items on fair use from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One points out the difficulty in reconciling digital rights management and fair use while the other discusses an interesting case in Colorado District Court where the EFF has filed an amicus brief supporting the right to make "intermediate copies". The case involves companies that make popular movies family-friendly by removing scenes of sex and violence but in creating their new versions, "the companies must first make an 'intermediate copy' of the entire movie on a computer in order to edit it." The intermediate copies are infringing according to the claims of movie directors like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and Steven Soderbergh and several movie studios. However, the "EFF argues that as long as making clean movies is not itself an infringing activity, the practice of making intermediate copies should be considered non-infringing also. This is a important point, because intermediate copies are crucial to the process of creating new copyrighted works."

Thanks, Peter.

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