But I'd imagine those probably fell under the category of obviously frivolous lawsuits. By their very nature, one can't avoid those. But I'm fairly sure that in most fair use cases, the defendant doesn't get a whole lot, and often doesn't even have their legal fees paid for in the end. That's the impression I got from Lessig's book, anyway.
But I'd be interesting in reading any caselaw where people have won in such instances, if you could send me any references.
FF
On 8/18/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
This is why I consider our "fair use" policy in general to be preemptive -- it's a policy of announcing, "Hey, this is what we'll say, and we'll probably win, so don't even try it." It's as close as we can get, in the confines of the current copyright law, of being at all secure in these things, since "fair use" is only a defensive claim (you can't sue somebody for obstructing your "fair use" of their materials, as a counter-example).
This is very true, but there have been cases of costs being awarded when valid fair use claims were improperly attacked.
Ec