[net.audio] Copied

jj (04/16/83)

"Unauthorized copying, LENDING, hiring, public performance, diffusion
and broadcasting of this recording prohibited."

Unauthorized LENDING?

I inquire of the net:
	Is this even remotely supported by law?

Furthermore, regarding the word diffusion:
	Does this mean that I must soundproof my house and never open
the windows while I am playing a digital disc?

Comments to the net, please, if they are informed.  Comments to
/dev/null otherwise.

gh (04/17/83)

Re: Prohibitions on "unauthorized lending" of digital disks (and other media).

In many countries, copyright law supports a concept known as public lending
rights (PLR), which is intended to compensate an author for royalties lost
through people borrowing his/her book from libraries instead of buying it.

In Australia, the case I know about, PLR royalties are paid by the federal
government, and are based on the presence of a book in libraries rather than
the actual number of times it is borrowed.  This takes the financial and
administrative burden from the local public libraries.

"Unauthorized lending" would presumably be lending by a library without the
appropriate PLR payments being made, in a country where this was required.

I have never heard of PLR in the United States, nor do my references on U.S.
copyright law mention it.

	Graeme Hirst, Brown Computer Science
	!decvax!brunix!gh	gh.brown@udel-relay

leichter (04/19/83)

I'm not a lawyer so I can't claim 100% certainty on this, but I have had an
interest in copyright questions and have a friend who IS a lawyer and special-
izes in copyright law; so...

Copyright provides no protection whatsoever against someone lending or
re-selling a copyrighted item.  I have also never seen the word "diffusion"
used in this context, except in French.  I don't believe it has any particular
meaning.

Someone at the record company is trying to scare people who buy the records.
They can't do a damn thing to you for lending the record, but they hope they
can make you THINK they can.

The only way they could place additional constraints on you - like preventing
you from lending the record - would be to have you agree to a contract that
forbade it.  They MIGHT claim that the notice on the record implied a contract
that you entered into when you bought the record.  Given the wording - which
simply claims that they are ALREADY protected, not that you are agreeing to
special protection - this would be a hard claim to support.  Even if the
wording was explicit, it would be very hard to support; given the usual ways
of doing business in record stores, it would be absurd to claim that a
notice of this sort - unless written in very large type - constituted a con-
tract that a consumer entered into.

In summary:  Ignore it.
							-- Jerry
						decvax!yale-comix!leichter
							leichter@yale

jpl (04/21/83)

Copyright laws generally prohibit resale of the copyrighted material in
any form other than than the way it was originally packaged. This means
you can't copy a tape on to a blank and sell the blank, nor can you
replace the label or cover and sell the repackaged item.
Jeff Lankford	mhtsa!jpl