Bonnie Scott <bonnie@staff.prodigy.com> writes:
> I hate to chime in here, because this subject has been beaten to death on
> three different mailing lists I am subscribed to, but...
It's just one of those things. The Internet/Usenet and copyright law
just *don't* mesh nicely, and they're not going to mesh nicely ever.
So the subject comes up over and over again -- I've been debating it
on the Net since the late 1970s, well before the Berne Convention.
> WRONG. Think about the word copyright. *The right to make a copy.*
> The owner always reserves the right to make a copy, whether or not
> that is stated,
> per the Berne convention agreement of 1920-something, subject to revision
> by the 1996 copyright convention. Unless this int'l convention actually
> changed something, ONLY the copyright holder has the right to decide
> when a copy of the work gets made.
> S/he makes the first set of copies by placing
> into a *pre-defined distribution stream*. Any use of the work outside
> of this distribution stream, whether it is a mailing list or a
> newsgroup, must be checked with
> the authors of the work, unless it is a small enough section of the work to
> be considered fair use.
> [...]
> HINT: The key phrase here is *pre-defined distribution stream*. For my
> mailing lists, that is a set of human beings reading the messages for their
> own entertainment and/or enlightenment.
Mostly correct, but as you say, the whole ball o' wax is the
"pre-defined distribution stream". While that's pretty easy to figure
in the case of a book or other printed matter, it's an incredibly difficult
concept to define in the case of the Net.
To use Usenet as an example, when you post an article, you set in
motion a very large chain of automatic events which result in copying
of your (implicitly copyrighted) work. Historically and currently,
this has consisted of copies on news servers (the normal case),
news-to-mail gateways, magnetic-tape-based feeds, news-to-Web
gateways, online and offline private archives, online public archives
(e.g., DejaNews), archival media (e.g., CD-ROMs) and distribution by
printed copy. All of these are (or have been) normal ways of
distributing netnews articles.
Now, which of these are part of the "pre-defined distribution stream"?
All of them, probably.
Which leaves us with a conundrum: while Usenet articles are
technically copyrighted works, it may be effectively impossible
to infringe that copyright, as a practical matter. (I'm not talking
about otherwise-copyrighted material being purloined and posted to the
Net; that's another issue entirely.)
The extent to which this logic applies to mailing lists is unclear,
but it should not be disregarded.
I am beginning to agree with the school of thought that copyright law
is almost dead, except for commercial piracy of tangible copies.
Or perhaps not dead, but mostly irrelevant to the coming century.
I'll try to provide a pointer to an excellent article by Esther Dyson
about the death of copyright law and how artists and authors will have
to begin creating new types of income streams related to their works
of authorship. (I thought it was up on HotWired, but I can't find it;
I think I have an [archival, heh heh] copy around somewhere, though.)
--
Michael C. Berch
Member of the California Bar
mcb@postmodern.com / mcb@greatcircle.com
References:
|
|
