Re: Proposal for 3.4 Success Criteria

> to convey a sense of the music by including a short excerpt. My advice would
> be that they should use a fairly low quality version to ensure a small
> download is required. I also recognise that not everyone is going to make the

This is still going to put you into a high risk area with respect to
intellectual property rights.  The copyright owners may not be prepared
to license the use of reduced quality material, or may only be prepared
to license it (one service offering aerial photographs of the UK, will
only grant a licence for web use if the quality of the image is degraded;
this is a paid licence, which is stiil too expensive for amateur use).

Also, and noting that I am not a lawyer, because the ability to include
sound was limited to a few organisations until recently, I doubt that
there is much case law on what constitutes "fair use" (a concept that
is not well defined at the best of times).  One of the "fair use"
permissions (UK at least) is for criticism and review, but I'm not
sure that a clip simply to identify the material would fall under that
permission and what is permissible for more explicit criticism and review
probably hasn't been well defined yet.

It's also possible that using low quality material might compromise a 
"fair use" defence.

I'd therefore suggest that any inclusion of any part of this track would
need a written copyright clearance, or insurance against legal risks.

Received on Sunday, 5 August 2001 05:35:43 UTC