Morning Links — Why I stopped pirating and started paying for media

I thought I read once that reimexs were permissible as long as they don’t provide a substitute for the original content. The story was about a lady who filmed her son while he was dancing to a song on the radio and then posted it on YouTube so her relatives could see the baby’s funny dance. The musician performing the song on the radio sued claiming she was infringing on the song, and then judge voted in her favour since a) the sample’ of the song was so short that someone seeking to have the content would not watch the video instead of actually buying the content and b) that people were watching the video primarily to see the baby therefore the portion of the song which was used was incidental and again, not a replacement for actually purchasing the song. In other words, if it was the song you were after, watching the video would not be a replacement and therefore she was not infringing. Similarly, I think fanfic falls into this same grey area because people do not read it *instead of* watching the original media, they read it in addition. Since it cannot serve as a replacement where someone might read the fanfic instead of consuming the original content, it does not infringe. This is common sense to me and I think that over time, we will see the laws loosen back toward common sense a little where, while they will not per se endorse such uses as described above, they will not prohibit them and they will introduce a fairness test similar to the one Canada has to test for whether a use is an education fair use exception (it is a six-part test). I really don’t see even the most zealous copyright fanatic going after someone for reading a fanfic