xjwsforChrist

I'm not so sure the disclaimer is for sites like JWN, SixScreens, etc. (peace to you, all!). They've been around a LONG time and the WTBTS doesn't lose enough members for such to be a threat. Remember, they're run by "apostates," so most aren't going to pay much attention to them. There is a site out there... now... however, that may be an actual threat. NOT just in leading people AWAY... but away to another religion (versus atheism/apostasy). That site is "AnointedJW.org". Unfortunately, they may not be much better.

They're not worried about sites that lead people away with OPPOSING views or OPPOSITE teachings - their members don't run toward that. But this one... ALSO claims to be "Jehovah's Witnesses." And so, any "WTBTS" JWs who are disillusioned with that organization and its leadership now have another "where" to "go away to"... another golden calf "called Jehovah"... whose "witnesses" they can STILL be.

They are indeed TELLING people, outright, that coming to one of those entities is the best way to go if you are coming out of wt.

I'm not so sure the disclaimer is for sites like JWN, SixScreens, etc. (peace to you, all!). They've been around a LONG time and the WTBTS doesn't lose enough members for such to be a threat. Remember, they're run by "apostates," so most aren't going to pay much attention to them. There is a site out there... now... however, that may be an actual threat. NOT just in leading people AWAY... but away to another religion (versus atheism/apostasy). That site is "AnointedJW.org". Unfortunately, they may not be much better.

They're not worried about sites that lead people away with OPPOSING views or OPPOSITE teachings - their members don't run toward that. But this one... ALSO claims to be "Jehovah's Witnesses." And so, any "WTBTS" JWs who are disillusioned with that organization and its leadership now have another "where" to "go away to"... another golden calf "called Jehovah"... whose "witnesses" they can STILL be.

Seriously, dear ones... I feel another WTBTS schizm coming. And I think they do, too.

I don't think they're worried about people taking the content and maligning/exposing it; I think they're worried about people using it, by appearing to AGREE with it... to lead folks away. A Catholic/Anglican kind of situation. THAT is a REAL threat to them. Because THAT could REALLY cost them some money.

Que sera, sera.

Peace to you, all!

A slave of Christ,

Shellamar, who marvels at those organizations who think big numbers mean something when it comes to God and Christ, and forget the account of Gideon (Judges 7 through ...

2) When do such committees become legally unmanageable? And why has the Society ordered elders, in the past, specifically NOT to refer or attribute local decisions to Bethel/The Legal Staff/The Society? How long can they go on using uneducated window washers as unpaid remote employees and expect them to manage difficult questions by telephone calls to HQ?

I'm just not going to use their site anymore. If anyone asks me, I will say, "Because they alerted me to their Terms of Use and said I have to agree to them to use their site. I don't, so I won't." .....LQ

This is from Wikipedia :
Fair use under United States law

The legal concept of "test copyright" was first ratified by the United Kingdom of Great Britain's Statute of Anne of 1709. As room was not made for the authorized reproduction of copyrighted content within this newly formulated statutory right, the courts created a doctrine of "Fairness Abridgement" in Gyles v Wilcox,[1] which eventually evolved into the modern concept of "fair use", that recognized the utility of such actions. The doctrine only existed in the US as common law until it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107.

17 U.S.C. § 107

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.[2]

The four factors of analysis for fair use set forth above derive from the opinion of Joseph Story in Folsom v. Marsh ,[3] in which the defendant had copied 353 pages from the plaintiff's 12-volume biography of George Washington in order to produce a separate two-volume work of his own.[4] The court rejected the defendant's fair use defense with the following explanation:

[A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy ...

In short, we must often ... look to the nature and objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used, and the degree in which the use may prejudice the sale, or diminish the profits, or supersede the objects, of the original work.

Once these factors were codified as guidelines in 17 U.S.C. § 107, they were not rendered exclusive.[citation needed] The section was intended by Congress to restate, but not replace, the prior judge-made law. Courts are still entitled to consider other factors as well.

Fair use tempers copyright's exclusive rights to serve the purpose of copyright law, which the US Constitution defines as the promotion of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (Art. I, § 8, cl. . This principle applies particularly well to the case of criticism and also sheds light on various other limitations on copyright's exclusive rights, particularly the scenes à faire doctrine.
Purpose and character

The first factor is regarding whether the use in question helps fulfill the intention of copyright law to stimulate creativity for the enrichment of the general public, or whether it aims to only "supersede the objects" of the original for reasons of personal profit. To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new. A key consideration is the extent to which the use is interpreted as transformative, as opposed to merely derivative.

When Tom Forsythe appropriated Barbie dolls for his photography project "Food Chain Barbie" (depicting several copies of the doll naked and disheveled and about to be baked in an oven, blended in a food mixer, and the like), Mattel lost its claims of copyright and trademark infringement against him because his work effectively parodies Barbie and the values she represents.[5] When Jeff Koons tried to justify his appropriation of Art Rogers' photograph "Puppies" in his sculpture "String of Puppies" with the same parody defense, he lost because his work was not presented as a parody of Rogers' photograph in particular, but of society at large, which was deemed insufficiently justificatory.[6]

However, since this case, courts have begun to emphasize the first fair use factor—assessing whether the alleged infringement has transformative use as described by the Hon. Judge Pierre N. Leval.[7] In 2006, Koons was involved in a similar case with commercial photographer Andrea Blanch,[8] regarding his use of her photograph for a painting, whereby he appropriated a central portion of an advertisement she had been commissioned to shoot for a magazine. In this case, Koons won; the case sets a favorable precedent for appropriation art where the use is deemed transformative.

The subfactor mentioned in the legislation above, "whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes", has recently been de-emphasized in some Circuits "since many, if not most, secondary uses seek at least some measure of commercial gain from their use".[9] More important is whether the use fulfills any of the "preamble purposes" also mentioned in the legislation above, as these have been interpreted as paradigmatically "transformative". Although Judge Pierre Leval has distinguished the first factor as "the soul of fair use", it alone is not determinative. For example, not every educational usage is fair.[10] See also L.A. Times v. Free Republic, described below.
Nature of the copied work

Although the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the availability of copyright protection should not depend on the artistic quality or merit of a work, fair use analyses consider certain aspects of the work to be relevant, such as whether it is fictional or non-fictional.[11]

To prevent the private ownership of work that rightfully belongs in the public domain, facts and ideas are separate from copyright—only their particular expression or fixation merits such protection. On the other hand, the social usefulness of freely available information can weigh against the appropriateness of copyright for certain fixations. The Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy, for example, was purchased and copyrighted by Time magazine. Yet their copyright was not upheld, in the name of the public interest, when they tried to enjoin the reproduction of stills from the film in a history book on the subject in Time Inc v. Bernard Geis Associates.[12]

In the decisions of the Second Circuit in Salinger v. Random House[13] and in New Era Publications Int'l v. Henry Holt & Co,[14] the aspect of whether the copied work has been previously published was considered crucial, assuming the right of the original author to control the circumstances of the publication of their work or preference not to publish at all. However, U.S. federal judge Pierre N. Leval views this importation of certain aspects of France's droit moral d'artiste (moral rights of the artist) into American copyright law as "bizarre and contradictory" because it sometimes grants greater protection to works that were created for private purposes that have little to do with the public goals of copyright law, than to those works that copyright was initially conceived to protect.[15] This is not to claim that unpublished works, or, more specifically, works not intended for publication, do not deserve legal protection, but that any such protection should come from laws about privacy, rather than laws about copyright. The statutory fair use provision was amended in response to these concerns by adding a final sentence: "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."
Amount and substantiality

The third factor assesses the quantity or percentage of the original copyrighted work that has been imported into the new work. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, ex: a few sentences of a text for a book review, the more likely that the sample will be considered fair use. Yet see Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. for a case in which substantial copying—entire programs for private viewing—was upheld as fair use, at least when the copying is done for the purposes of time-shifting. Likewise, see Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, where the Ninth Circuit held that copying an entire photo to use as a thumbnail in online search results did not weigh against fair use, "if the secondary user only copies as much as is necessary for his or her intended use". Conversely, in Harper & Row Publishers Inc v. Nation Enters,[16] the use of fewer than 400 words from President Ford's memoir by a political opinion magazine was interpreted as infringement because those few words represented "the heart of the book" and were, as such, substantial.

Before 1991, sampling in certain genres of music was accepted practice and such copyright considerations as these were viewed as largely irrelevant. The strict decision against rapper Biz Markie's appropriation of a Gilbert O'Sullivan song in the case Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc.[17] changed practices and opinions overnight. Samples now had to be licensed, as long as they rose "to a level of legally cognizable appropriation."[18] In other words, de minimis sampling was still considered fair and free because, traditionally, "the law does not care about trifles." The recent Sixth Circuit Court decision in the appeal to Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films has reversed this standing, eliminating the de minimis defense for samples of recorded music, but stating that the decision did not apply to fair use.
Effect upon work's value

The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his or her original work. The court not only investigates whether the defendant's specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's market, but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the infringement on commercial use of the work. See Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios,[19] where the copyright owner, Universal, failed to provide any empirical evidence that the use of Betamax had either reduced their viewership or negatively impacted their business. In the aforementioned Nation case regarding President Ford's memoirs, the Supreme Court labeled this factor "the single most important element of fair use" and it has indeed enjoyed some level of primacy in fair use analyses ever since. Yet the Supreme Court's more recent announcement in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc[20] that "all [four factors] are to be explored, and the results weighed together, in light of the purposes of copyright" has helped modulate this emphasis in interpretation.

In evaluating the fourth factor, courts often consider two kinds of harm to the potential market of the original work: First, courts consider whether the use in question acts as a direct market substitute for the original work. In the judgement of the Supreme Court in Acuff-Rose Music they decisively stated that, "when a commercial use amounts to mere duplication of the entirety of the original, it clearly supersedes the object of the original and serves as a market replacement for it, making it likely that cognizable market harm to the original will occur". In one instance, a court ruled that this factor weighed against a defendant who had made unauthorized movie trailers for video retailers, since his trailers acted as direct substitutes for the copyright owner's official trailers.[21] Second, courts also consider whether potential market harm might exist beyond that of direct substitution, such as in the potential existence of a licencing market. This consideration has weighed against commercial copy shops that make copies of articles in course-pack for college students, when a market already existed for the licensing of course-pack copies.[22]

Courts recognize that certain kinds of market harm do not oppose fair use, such as when a parody or negative review impairs the market of the original work. Copyright considerations may not shield a work against adverse criticism.
Fair use and professional communities

Courts, when deciding fair use cases, in addition to looking at context, amount and value of the use, also look to the standards and practices of the professional communities where the case comes from.[23] Among the communities are documentarians, librarians, makers of Open Courseware, visual art educators, and communications professors.[24][25][26][27]

Such codes of best practices have permitted communities of practice to make more informed risk assessments in employing fair use in their daily practice.[28] For instance, documentarians must obtain errors and omissions insurance before most broadcasters and cablecasters will accept it. Before they created a code of best practices in 2005, no errors and omissions insurance routinely accepted fair use claims. Now, all such insurers in the U.S. accept fair use claims within the terms of their code.[29]
Practical effect of fair use defense

The practical effect of the fair use doctrine is that a number of conventional uses of copyrighted works are not considered infringing. For instance, quoting from a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment upon it or teach students about it, is considered a fair use. Certain well-established uses cause few problems. A teacher who prints a few copies of a poem to illustrate a technique will have no problem on all four of the above factors (except possibly on amount and substantiality), but some cases are not so clear. All the factors are considered and balanced in each case: a book reviewer who quotes a paragraph as an example of the author's style will probably fall under fair use even though he may sell his review commercially; but a non-profit educational website that reproduces whole articles from technical magazines will probably be found to infringe if the publisher can demonstrate that the website affects the market for the magazine, even though the website itself is non-commercial.

Free Republic, LLC, owner of the political website freerepublic.com, was found liable for copyright infringement in L.A. Times v. Free Republic for reproducing and archiving full-text versions of plaintiffs' news articles even though the judge found the website minimally commercial. She held that "while defendants' do not necessarily 'exploit' the articles for commercial gain, their posting to the Free Republic site allows defendants and other visitors to avoid paying the 'customary price' charged for the works."[30]

The April 2000 opinion ruled concerning the four factors of fair use that 1) defendants' use of plaintiffs' articles is minimally, if at all, transformative, 2) the factual content of the articles copied "weighs in favour of finding of fair use of the news articles by defendants in this case", though it didn't "provide strong support" 3) concerning the amount and substantiality prong, "the wholesale copying of plaintiffs' articles weighs against the finding of fair use", and 4) the plaintiffs showed that they were trying to exploit the market for viewing their articles online and defendants did not rebut their showing by proving an absence of usurpation harm to plaintiffs. Ultimately the court found "that the defendants may not assert a fair use defense to plaintiffs' copyright infringement claim".
Fair use as a defense

The Supreme Court of the United States described fair use as an affirmative defense in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.[20] This means that in litigation on copyright infringement, the defendant bears the burden of raising and proving that the use was fair and not an infringement. Thus, fair use need not even be raised as a defense unless the plaintiff first shows (or the defendant concedes) a "prima facie" case of copyright infringement. If the work was not copyrightable, the term had expired, or the defendant's work borrowed only a small amount, for instance, then the plaintiff cannot make out a prima facie case of infringement, and the defendant need not even raise the fair use defense.

Some copyright owners claim infringement even in circumstances where the fair use defense would likely succeed, in hopes that the user will refrain from the use rather than spending resources in his defense. Strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) cases such as these—alleging copyright infringement, patent infringement, defamation, or libel—often come into conflict with the defendant's right to freedom of speech, and has prompted some jurisdictions to pass anti-SLAPP legislation which raises the plaintiff's burdens and risk.

Although fair use ostensibly permits certain uses without liability, many content creators and publishers try to avoid a potential court battle by seeking a legally unnecessary license from copyright owners for any use of non-public domain material, even in situations where a fair use defense would likely succeed. The simple reason is that the license terms negotiated with the copyright owner may be much less expensive than defending against a copyright suit, or having the mere possibility of a lawsuit threaten the publication of a work in which a publisher has invested significant resources.

The frequent argument over whether fair use is a "right" or a "defense" is generated by confusion over the use of the term "affirmative defense."[31] "Affirmative defense" is simply a term of art from litigation reflecting the timing in which the defense is raised. It does not distinguish between "rights" and "defenses", and so it does not characterize the substance of the defendant's actions as "not a right but a defense".

In response to perceived over-expansion of copyrights, several electronic civil liberties and free expression organizations began in the 1990s to add fair use cases to their dockets and concerns. These include the Electronic Frontier Foundation ("EFF"), the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the American Library Association, numerous clinical programs at law schools, and others. The "Chilling Effects" archive was established in 2002 as a coalition of several law school clinics and the EFF to document the use of cease and desist letters. Most recently, in 2006, Stanford University began an initiative called "The Fair Use Project" (FUP) to help artists, particularly filmmakers, fight lawsuits brought against them by large corporations.

In 2009, fair use appeared as a defense in lawsuits against filesharing. Charles Nesson argued that file-sharing qualifies as fair use in his defense of alleged filesharer Joel Tenenbaum.[32] Kiwi Camara, defending alleged filesharer Jammie Thomas, announced a similar defense.[33]

On September 2, 2009 Israeli District court ruled out a detailed decision[34] not allowing disclosure of "John Doe"'s details for the request of the FA Premier League based on several reasons, but the most interesting were that "fair use" under the new Israeli law of 2007 (which is based on the US 4 factors test) is a right and not merely a defense. The court specifically states that the public may have base for a legal cause of action if its fair use right is infringed by the copyright holder. Other important decision in said judgment is the fact that the court finds streaming Internet filesharing site of live soccer games not infringing copyright as this use is fair use (mainly due to the importance of certain sport events and the public's right). The court analyzes the 4 factors and decides that due to such importance of sporting games (and other less important factors), such use is fair.

On 14 November 2013, Judge Denny Chin of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Google Books mass digitisation of millions of books from research library collections is justified under the doctrine of fair use under U.S. copyright law.[35]

Fair Use is the act of violating any of a copyright owner’s exclusive rights granted by the federal Copyright Act.
Fair use and parody

Producers or creators of parodies of a copyrighted work have been sued for infringement by the targets of their ridicule, even though such use may be protected as fair use. These fair use cases distinguish between parodies (using a work in order to poke fun at or comment on the work itself) and satires (using a work to poke fun at or comment on something else). Courts have been more willing to grant fair use protections to parodies than to satires, but the ultimate outcome in either circumstance will turn on the application of the four fair use factors.

In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc[20] the Supreme Court recognized parody as a potential fair use, even when done for profit. Roy Orbison's publisher, Acuff-Rose Music Inc, had sued 2 Live Crew in 1989 for their use of Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" in a mocking rap version with altered lyrics. The Supreme Court viewed 2 Live Crew's version as a ridiculing commentary on the earlier work, and ruled that when the parody was itself the product rather than used for mere advertising, commercial sale did not bar the defense. The Campbell court also distinguished parodies from satire, which they described as a broader social critique not intrinsically tied to ridicule of a specific work, and so not deserving of the same use exceptions as parody because the satirist's ideas are capable of expression without the use of the other particular work.

A number of appellate decisions have recognized that a parody may be a protected fair use, including both the Second (Leibovitz v. Paramount Pictures Corp.) and Ninth Circuits (Mattel v. Walking Mountain Productions). Most recently, in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin, a suit was brought unsuccessfully against the publication of The Wind Done Gone, which reused many of the characters and situations from Gone with the Wind, but told the events from the point of view of the slaves rather than the slaveholders. The Eleventh Circuit, applying Campbell, recognized that The Wind Done Gone was fair use, and vacated the district court's injunction against its publication.
Fair use on the Internet

A US court case in 2003, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, provides and develops the relationship between thumbnails, inline linking and fair use. In the lower District Court case on a motion for summary judgment, Arriba Soft was found to have violated copyright without a fair use defense in the use of thumbnail pictures and inline linking from Kelly's website in Arriba's image search engine. That decision was appealed and contested by Internet rights activists such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argued that it is clearly covered under fair use.

On appeal, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found in favour of the defendant. In reaching its decision, the court utilized the above-mentioned four-factor analysis. First, it found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative, noting that they were not meant to be viewed at high resolution like the original artwork was. Second, the photographs had already been published diminishing the significance of their nature as creative works. Third, although normally making a "full" replication of a copyrighted work may appear to violate copyright, here it was found to be reasonable and necessary in light of the intended use. Last, the court found that the market for the original photographs would not be substantially diminished by the creation of the thumbnails. To the contrary, the thumbnail searches could increase exposure of the originals. In looking at all these factors as a whole, the court found that the thumbnails were fair use and remanded the case to the lower court for trial after issuing a revised opinion on July 7, 2003. The remaining issues were resolved with a default judgment after Arriba Soft had experienced significant financial problems and failed to reach a negotiated settlement.

In August 2008 US District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose, California ruled that copyright holders cannot order a deletion of an online file without determining whether that posting reflected "fair use" of the copyrighted material. The case involved Stephanie Lenz, a writer and editor from Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, who made a home video of her thirteen-month-old son dancing to Prince's song Let's Go Crazy and posted the video on YouTube. Four months later, Universal Music, the owner of the copyright to the song, ordered YouTube to remove the video enforcing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lenz notified YouTube immediately that her video was within the scope of fair use, and demanded that it be restored. YouTube complied after six weeks, not two weeks as required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Lenz then sued Universal Music in California for her legal costs, claiming the music company had acted in bad faith by ordering removal of a video that represented fair use of the song.[36] For more information, see Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.

She now believes what they tell her regarding me.

With the recent post on the JW website of a USE OF TERMS disclaimer it seems their so called "greatest campaign in history" may be back firing!!!

For them to come out so blatantly strong and threatening, basically fear mongering, they have been shaken by something or someone.

Even so (and I direct this to our dear Sher'f - peace to you and thank you for the "Fair Use" information), the disclaimer is probably more as to information that is leaked/posted elsewhere... BEFORE it's released by the WTBTS and/or posted on JW.org. BEFORE it is made PUBLIC and so when "fair use" laws haven't kicked in, yet. In which case, folks who are posting, say, copies of BOE letters... which letters are PROPRIETARY... on public boards/private forums should be VERY careful. Because it's one thing to claim that one got such off an Internet board; it's another to make that claim when the information has not yet been posted on such a board (i.e., JW.org) and so should not BE on ANY Internet board, yet.....Shelby

but should find out for themselves... if they even believe it is their business to begin with.