20 Mar
2007
20 Mar
'07
11:30 a.m.
der Mouse wrote:
Indeed.
I'm fairly certain it used to be in the UK, same for film - the copyright
notice states that lending is illegal. Maybe things are a little less
draconian now... (but then with more DRM around these days, it seems like the
companies are winning the war and people can do even less now with things that
they have in their possession than they once could)
I suppose it
does come down to a question of scale in the case of
distribution; how much is too much?
"Enough to annoy someone with deep pockets in a relevant jurisdiction",
seems to me to be the most pragmatic answer. I mean all
sorts of copyright laws get broken every day with things
like people recording TV shows to VCR, or lending their friends their
music CDs etc. and nobody gets in trouble for that.
Lending someone a music CD actually is not a copyright violation (well,
in most jurisdictions - there may be one somewhere that objects to it) Recording TV shows to VCR to timeshift (ie, to watch
at a time other
than when the show airs), I believe there's case law saying that's
acceptable, at least in the USA - that's why the TiVo and its ilk are
permitted.
Now I believe that's still illegal in the UK - but it's not illegal to sell a
device capable of doing it, it's just technically illegal for a user to
actually use it for that purpose.
Yes, much of the archiving and sharing we (TINW) do is
technically
copyright violation. Whether it is copyright violation that will
actually get anyone in trouble is another matter; I think what you are
(and we should be) trying for here is a way to make sure we stay on the
safe side of *that* line.
... or at least that if we do cross that line in someone's eyes, there are
easy ways of correcting the problem without harming the entire archive.
Like, apparently, many of us here, I do not
consider all copyright infringement equally wrong;
... and nor do the courts, it seems, but the problem is that the law's murky
at best, particularly in a global environment. I can't see how we can
realistically avoid falling foul of it at some point - it's either that or
seek written distribution permission for *anything* that's put online, which
would probably rule out most things given that companies have folded or
changed hands many times, authors may be no longer with us, and the question
of who actually "owns" any given item is difficult to say.
The position's something that just needs to be agreed on up-front I think,
rather than worried about later (which is what always seems to bite the big
online "public services")
cheers
Jules