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Thanks for the response, Eric. I'm fighting a deadline and lack time to
answer you point by point. But as a matter of accuracy, I would like to
disagree especially with your statement below:

>>[David:] Aren't there still a few things that separate journalists from
>> butchers and insurance reps? 
>
>[Eric:] Fair use is not a right of the journalist. It is a right of the 
>public. Fair use insures that the public can see enough of a 
>copyright work to evaluate, for example, its newsworthiness or value 
>for purchase. If the studio already is letting the public see these 
>things for those reasons, how would the public benefit from your 
>using them, too?

Fair use is also for writers and editors and lyricists and other
questionable characters, not just the public alone. The Live Crew case, if
memory serves, involved fair use as a defense of a satire of the "Pretty
Woman" song. Similarly The Nation *tried* to invoke fair use when a book
publisher sued it for allegedly giving the public too much of a preview of
a book. Publishers themselves, while not the biggest boosters of fair use,
take advantage of it all the time. Why else would a lawyer working for a
Viacom subsidiary tell the editors that I had a right to reproduce an image
or so from a Web site? Luckily those issues aren't as clear-cut as the more
zealous of the copyright interests would have us believe. Copyright
zealotry can harm freedom of expression and that is indeed of interest to
the public. Our print newspapers are dull enough, thank you; no one will
benefit if Hollywood bullies needlessly inhabit the online incarnations.
Plus, there are the political aspects--as shown by the Georgia governor's
use of a copyright notice to accompany an official photo on the Web. Simply
put, fair use issues *can* be gut-level 1st Amendments matters.

Be interesting to see what the lawyer for the San Antonio paper concludes.
Me, I think fair use is a noble cause, even in a commercial context. You
think that Live Crew is a philanthropy? ;-)

David 




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