Oh, my .... I do sense another flamewar coming on, and I'm afraid that I
might have to add fuel to it. Now, mind you, up front - I agree that there
are many issues to be decided on how copyrights apply to the online medium
(such as definitions of "copy", "archive", "personal use", etc.) The only
good news is that I don't think a discussion of copyrights is to off topic
for this conference (after all, it's likely to be a search engine service
that gets sued first under the copyright law - they've got the biggest
pockets to go after.)
<SOAPBOX>
I think, for the most part, the posts about copyrights by this mailing list
have shown a real lack of understanding for the laws. I'll give my basis
upfront: I am a content creator. I create copyrighted works. So do you.
The operative agreement for this discussion has nothing to do with U.S. law
- it's the international copyright treaty called the Bourne Convention
(which almost every single nation of the world has become a signatory of.)
The Bourne Convention protects content creators (from semi-literate
tribesmen to Madonna) in a most aggressive fashion.
For example, "copyright statements" are completely optional - they
essentially just say "I know my rights." They aren't required, they add
nothing to your protection, and failure to display does not diminish your
rights. They can be used, however, to give up rights such as "This is
released to the public domain."
The rights to reproduction, alteration, inclusion in compilations, etc. all
rest in the AUTHOR OF THE WORK unless specifically given away. There are
exceptions (and it is these exceptions that cause the most definitional
problems in the online arena.)
The belief put forward by Robert Turk, IMHO, is not only wrong - it's
dangerous to the growth of the online media. No one is going to make content
for the web if they know it becomes a public domain donation to the world
(except some governmental sources, research sources, etc.... but those works
weren't copyrightable in the first place!) There is also a significant
difference between "copyrighted material" and "proprietary information"
(although Mr. Turk attempts to equate the two as one and the same.)
I dare Mr. Turk to use his VCR to record _Star Wars_ from cable and make
significant clips from that available on the Internet - after all, if it's
broadcast on TV, it's not copyrighted anymore, right? Just because media is
transmitted does not cause it to lose it's protections under these laws.
I don't even see any reason why any sane individual would argue for these
rules to be changed - I can guarantee you that every publisher, film
production company, author, cartoonist, artist, etc. would stop putting
their work on the Internet and our spiders & robots wouldn't have to work as
hard indexing content.
</SOAPBOX>
Off the soapbox, I agree that the web should be free ... free from per-
information-access charges, as close to free monetarily as it can be.
However, a media can be free (like television - well, actually we *do* pay
for television, it's just tacked on our other purchases as advertising
expense) and still not rob content creators of their authorship rights.
What does this have to do with robots? There is a significant difference,
one must admit, to "indexing" and "archiving" ... almost everyone would
agree that even a search engine that indexes a major percentage of a webpage
is not violating any copyrights - after all, you can read the whole page at
Webcrawler, only index it and then visit it.
Under an archiving system, a third-party can access the work - the image,
the text, whatever. In the same way that a book publisher has to get my
release to reproduce a screen-shot image of a webpage (because of the Bourne
Convention), I believe an image or text archiver (not for personal use, or
educational use, etc. under one of the exceptions to the Convention) must
secure permission from the author of such a work.
Apologies for the flames - this is just a discussion I've had to have
hundreds of times when I've found people using my media on their pages
without even a "can I use this?" email sent to me. They always try to argue
the same thing... isn't it free (see my ancient homepage rant on the subject
at http://www.radzone.org/bclark/rights.html) ... a factor made all the
worse by Netscape's "right-click-to-rip-the-artist-off" image save feature.
Brian
-------- REPLY, Original message follows --------
Date: Monday, 09-Sep-96 09:49 AM
From: Robert B. Turk \ Internet: (rturk@austin.ibm.com) To:
It is my belief, however, that a document on the world-wide-web has been
made public, and therefore it shouldn't matter whether a web browser caches
it, or simply views or prints it, or whether a robot references the file, or
whatever...that the web should mean free sharing of ideas.
All your copyrighted materials or intellectual property should be behind
some kind of authentication or security barrier, beyond which a traverser
agrees to certain terms of non-disclosure before getting access to the
information. Then if you need to hold someone accountable for doing
something inappropriate with your sensitive information you can go to your
logs and say that "You signed this agreement by entering this web space...so
you can't do that..."
-------- REPLY, End of original message --------