[d@DCC] The battle of the anti-copyright exceptions

[Chris Brand]

Russell wrote :
>   i) Royalty based licenses in the password-free part of the Internet.  
>Most of us who have been on the net for a long time believe this is an
>invalid request.  By authorizing a work to be on the password-free part of
>the Internet you are authorizing royalty-free verbatim distribution
>(caches, mirrors, printouts) for any reader, just as by mechanically
>creating a book you are understood as authorizing it to be read an
>unlimited number of times by an unlimited number of readers.

I certainly think that royalty-free is the default unless the author says
otherwise, but I don't see any real reason why the law should say that a
statement like "I explicitly do not authorize anyone to print a copy of
this webpage" should be unenforceable. Similarly, a statement that I
don't want my work cached archived, or mirrored, when made in an 
appropriate manner (i.e. machine-readable so that the caching machine is 
able to understand it) doesn't seem unreasonable. Of course, a statement 
on a page saying "the cost for reading this page is $1.00. Please send 
your cheque to..." should not be allowed because you don't get the chance 
to say "no". I wouldn't want to encourage any of these things, but I don't
see why they shouldn't be allowed.

>Note: There is a notice in the document that would suggest under a literal
>interpretation of it and the copyright act that what Google is doing was
>not explicitly authorized.  I would love to see the government sue Google
>over it, and have the Supreme Court clarify the entirely inappropriate
>nature of recommendations 4+5.

Aren't any of your own works in Google ? :-)

Syd wrote :
>I think our chance to have a copyright regime that defaulted to public
>domain was done away with some time ago.

I don't think that's quite what Russell's saying (and I know it's not
what I'm saying). What I'm saying is that the act of putting your work
on the (publicly-available) Internet without any statement restricting
the use of the work *is* an authorisation to copy (to RAM, video, hard drive,
paper, cache, mirror, archive, etc). No separate authorisation should be
needed because if you didn't want people to look at it, why the hell did
you put it there ? It's like saying that if you post your poem on a billboard
by the highway, you can't then charge people for reading it.

Chris


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