[Cdn-DMCA] Report from Toronto

[Kristofer Coward]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 01:33:47PM -0500, Tom Trottier wrote:
> > Well, I'm loath to expand the copyright bundle at all, but it does
> > basically make sense to me that the "communication to the
> > public" privilege which some classes of copyright holders currently have,
> > should be extended to everyone who holds copyright.  We've got so much
> > stress on licensing terms these days that I'm not sure it would make much
> > practical difference, though; that's one reason I'm not inclined to spend
> > a lot of time on the "making available" issue.
> 
> Licensing is another issue. Shrink wrap licenses have shady legal 
> standing, I believe. I think licensing shouldn't apply to copyright 
> materials, just to trade secrets. Vendor's choice.

You do realise that if copyrights cannot be licensed, then the General
Public _License_ kind of dies, right?

I think there's an important distinction between licensing the act of
making further copies of copyrighted material (which is perfectly
sensible, as the user is getting copyright priveleges for their
compliance) as opposed to licensing the act of using copyrighted
materials (a privelege the user implicitly obtained upon purchase of a
copy of the work)

There should also be a strong distinction made between copies for
distribution (restricted by copyright laws) and copies for use
(protected by fair dealing) so that we don't have zealous privelege
holders insisting that it is necessary to license from them the right
to make a copy of a piece of software in memory, or a copy of a page of
a book on/in one's retina[0])

0) If you don't believe that a copy is being made, stare at a steady
image for a minute and then look at a blank sheet of paper - you'll see
the effects of the chemical copy of the image having been made in your
eye. I was really impressed when this effect was referred to as part of
a technique for doing forensic analysis of energy weapons on Babylon 5,
even if there may have been some slight errors in the details.

-- 
Kristofer Coward				http://unripe.melon.org/
GPG Fingerprint: 2BF3 957D 310A FEEC 4733  830E 21A4 05C7 1FEB 12B3
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