franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) (03/07/86)
In a recent article, Jordan Breslow discusses the copyright law. He also asks two questions: is his article copyrighted, and is it OK to make a printout of it. After reading the article, the answer to neither of these questions is obvious to me. The problems have to do with the peculiar nature of the net. The article clearly has a valid U.S. copyright notice. In countries where a C in a circle is the only valid copyright symbol, the copyright would not be valid. However, let us direct our attention solely to U.S. copyright law, here. The other requirement is that the work have been published. The question is, does distribution over the net count as publishing? The law says that publishing is making available of copies of the work to the public "by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending." Certainly, distribution on the net constitutes transfer of ownership of copies of the work to the public. I suspect a court would rule that this is "other transfer of ownership", but this isn't obvious. (As a side issue, one might have trouble proving in court that Breslow was the one who submitted the article to the net, or even that he wrote it. I think, in this case, you *could* prove to the satisfaction of a jury that the author of the article did intend to distribute it via the net -- all that would be required is to have them actually read the article.) Now for the other question. Assuming we have concluded that the article is copyrighted, the immediate answer is no; that would be making an unauthorized copy. I am not sure that this is correct, however. When Breslow posted the article to the net, he implicitly gave permission for the normal copying of it performed by the net. At minimum, this includes, at minimum, the representations in the various machines on the net, and the ephemeral copies which appear on people's screens as they read it. But wait! Some of those copies aren't so ephemeral. I am sure that some of those on the net aren't using "screens", but "old-fashioned" printing terminals. Those people clearly have a printed copy by the normal copying mechanisms of the net. In fact, we have a whole spectrum of news-reading modes: 1) User (normally) reads news on a hard-copy terminal. 2) User reads news via an interface which transmits those articles he wishes to read to a printer. 3) User reads news by scanning subject lines and lengths, reading some articles on-line, sending others to the printer, and perhaps skipping some entirely. 4) User reads news on-line, routinely printing copies of interesting articles. 5) User normally just reads news on-line, but decides to print a copy of this article. It seems clear to me that in cases 1-3, the copy is legitimately obtained. One could argue that printing a copy is a "normal" part of the net news process, and so even case 5 is legitimate. How the courts would react to this argument I have no idea. (It would in any case be hard to prove in court that a user obtained his copy in this way, rather than as part of his news reading routine; but the primary question is what is legal, not what you can get away with.) Also at issue is the right to keep a copy on disk. This may be different for those who access a central news repository on their system (e.g., via rn), and those who get news sent to them specifically, like mail (as I understand DEC employees do). In the latter case, one is arguably just deciding what to do with the copy one has been given. It isn't clear to me (it might be if I read the law) whether the right to make backup copies for archival purposes applies to all copyrighted objects stored on machine- readable media, or just to software; in the latter case, the normal backup procedures at the reader's site might be a copyright violation. A related question is, would it be legal to respond to Mr. Breslow's article quoting it in whole or in part (e.g., putting a ">" in front of every line quoted)? Again, the question is the same: is this a normal part of the process of distributing an article on the net? It is clear that any such copy would have to include the copyright notice, of course. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and even if I were this would all be just speculation, anyhow. Frank Adams ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka Multimate International 52 Oakland Ave North E. Hartford, CT 06108