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Mitchell Gibbs wondered <<Does anyone know how the
courts have ruled on "fair use" when corporations use
copyrighted material? The fair use guidelines seem to be
fuzzy.>>
No idea what the courts have ruled, and even if I did, my
caveat would be that "jurisprudence" is a one-word
oxymoron: it's not necessarily prudent, and it's sometimes
easy to overturn if you can find a lawyer smart enough to find
the exception to the original court's decision.
The simplest test of fair use (and I emphasize that it's also an
overly _simplistic_ test in the legal sense) is to ask yourself
this question: are you using the quoted material to _support_
a well-prepared argument (or sales pitch) and add depth to it,
or to avoid doing the work of supporting the rhetoric by your
own efforts and your own creation of words or images? The
key word is "fair", thus a commonly cited second test is
"would I object if someone did that to me?" I don't much like
that criterion because there's such a huge variation in how
generous people are in having their words quoted. Attribution
is important, but it's not sufficient unto itself.
Case in point: Quoting someone's techwr-l message so you
can establish a context for your reply is certainly fair use.
Using their words, unattributed, in an article you write
somewhere else _can_ be fair use, but isn't necessarily; even
when it does constitute fair use, it's still simple politeness to
ask the person's permission. Moreover, anyone who writes
something copyrightable retains "moral rights" to the material,
which (again simplistically) means that you can't use that
person's words in a context that would libel or slander the
person, or associate them with something they find offensive
(e.g., most people would consider being quoted in a neo-Nazi
newsletter to be out of context and unacceptable), or
misrepresent the person's opinion. This gets tricky, obviously:
the media can quote you making a fool of yourself and get
away with it provided they don't take your words out of
context and associate them with something inappropriate.
Example: "Mr. Hart, do you approve of techwr-l?" "Yes, I
approve." [Later, on the news:] "In the ongoing debate on
censorship, Mr. Hart was heard to say 'I approve'."
