I recently ran across a blog posting on a website I helped to put together while living in Dominica. The website, RossPHR.org was originally constructed as a way to dispense news and information about the local chapter of the Physicians For Human Rights organization at Ross University in Dominica. This organization does great things like fund raising for locals and international aid campaigns.

In their latest post titled "Grange Video, Mitchel Dubois" someone has put together a slideshow based campaign to raise funds for this individual in Dominica. It's a great idea and hopefully their campaign will help to get this guy the care he needs. However, the author chose to use the hit single, "We Are The World" which was originally the title song for the famous USA for Africa campaign. It was written by musical giants Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones in 1985.-- Anyone who's anyone has heard the tune!

My question is, how did RossPHR secure the license to use this song in their slideshow. Well, I'm sure they did no such thing. In fact, I would take an educated guess and say they simply downloaded the song off the Internet and used it without ever once considering whether or not they were doing something wrong.

But blogs do this all the time. There are literally hundreds of thousands of instances of illegally used material on the web right now, perhaps more. Just take a look at YouTube. These days when I want to listen to a song, YouTube is usually my first stop--It's absolutely incredible. YouTube has made an honest effort to stop this, but really, it's nearly an impossible task.

The main issue here, and the one that will always "rub my rhubarb" is that nobody really cares. It probably never occurred to the the person who made this slideshow that they were infringing on the rights of another in their innocent endeavor to raise money for Mr. Dubois.

So my question here is--Do you consider this "fair use" ?