[d@DCC] Excess Copyright

[Russell McOrmond]

  I am taking another stab at trying to express my strong opposition to
recommendations 4 and 5 of the Heritage report.  Any feedback to improve
the article is greatly appreciated.  If a lawyer or law student wants to
grab the idea and run with it for a legal brief for policy makers, that
too would be greatly appreciated.


http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/excess-copyright.html

(Just the beginning and the end to give you a flavor of what I am saying.  
I expect to be fixing it up from feedback so don't want the first draft to
be mainly what people see).

   I  am  an independent creator on the Internet, and of Internet related
   software.   When  I  joined  the  ongoing  policy  discussions  around
   copyright  in  the  summer  of  2001 I assumed that I would be sitting
   across  the  table from Microsoft (and its Business Software Alliance,
   and  Canadian Alliance Against Software theft), the Recording Industry
   (Canadian  Recording  Industry  Association  ...of America), and other
   such  special  economic  interests.  What came as a shock was the fact
   that  groups claiming to represent creators such as the Writers Union,
   Access  Copyright and the Creators' Rights Alliance were also strongly
   opposed to not only the Internet but the forward-looking reforms I was
   discussing.

...

   I  believe  that  if  an  adequately informed Supreme Court were to be
   asked to rule on mirrors used by search engines and Internet archives,
   they  would  come  to  a  similar  conclusion:  that  because they are
   understood  as  an  important  part of the basic infrastructure of the
   Public  Internet  that  these  would  not be considered copies for the
   purposes  of  the  copyright  act. They would likely further recognize
   that it would be inappropriate to declare specific vendors like Google
   and Archive.org to be privileged, and would need to recognize that the
   entire  of  the  "no  membership  required"  part of the Internet must
   facilitate  verbatim  distribution  of  works  that are not themselves
   considered copies for the purpose of the copyright act.

   And  if these are not copies, how can Access Copyright and the Writers
   Union  possibly  defend  their  suggestion that they should be able to
   levy these non-copies? Sounds like non-sense to me.

-- 
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> 
 Code is Law: how software code regulates the activities of citizens,
 and acts similar to law.  How do we ensure transparency/accountability?  
 http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/code-is-law.html
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