chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (03/20/84)
(This is a witty saying to fool the eater of blank lines)
Disclaimer: I am not a copyright lawyer. If I was, I would be making much too
much money to worry about computers. Therefore, these are my opinions, and
not to be taken as the opinions of anyone or anything else. You don't even
need to agree with them if you don't want to.
Discussion: While I am not a specialist in copyrights, I have a background
in the print media and am very interested in the legal areas that affect
writers (software and traditional). It is my opinion that a good argument
can be made that usenet is a publishing entity and that anything published
upon it is entered into the public domain unless the publisher (in this
case, the submitter) specifically reserves rights to it with a copyright
notice. Under most circumstances, it isn't worth the time to reserve
rights, so we don't bother.
Lets look as a specific example. Why are we very hyper about not publishing
Bell Proprietary Unix code to net.sources? Because anything placed in
net.sources is effectively placed in the public domain, and effecting
licensing restrictions on it becomes realistically impossible. If we were
to ship the SystemV kernel over net.sources, you can well imagine what ATT
would do, because we have effectively ruined any chance of their being able
to control that software in the future.
I now make the assumption that everyone agrees that it is wrong to ship
known proprietary and restricted code over the net (let us not get into an
argument over whether Unix should be public domain... It isn't and it won't
be, and ATT will fight like hell to keep it that way). Now, music lyrics
such as that under discussion ('Wierd Al Yankovic's Eat It') are
copyrighted under the same laws that our software is, and have basically
the same restrictions. Can you tell me why it is wrong to post software and
right to post lyrics when they are governed the same way? Posting a lyric
will keep n number of people from buying the album or the sheet music for
that song the same way posting the kernel will keep n number of people from
buying a tape from Bell, to the same result. Loss of business and a
straightforward copyright violation.
It gets much worse than this, because under many circumstances people post
copyrighted material without the copyright marking, and in many cases
without any notation as to source, author, or anything. In the latter case,
this is what is known as plagiarism, because there is an explicit or
implied change of ownership of the material. In the former case, you have
just taken a copyrighted work and made it public domain. This was a
significant problem when we went through the phase where people were
typing in movie review columns off of the news service. It is very possible
for someone to take our version of the column and publish it again, and
make a good case for it to be in the public domain when the rights owner
comes to get them to pay for it. At that point, the rights owner has the
right to come to us for payment of lost money because we put it in the
public domain.
Well, what can they do to us? Usenet is simply an unofficial grouping of
computers, there is no central authority for them to attack, right?
I see two ways that a bunch of lawyers could attack the net for a copyright
violation. First, they could track down the source and sue the individual
and the company that he works for (for allowing him to place their work in
the public domain). Chances are that the companies lawyers would take one
look at the case, settle very quietly out of court, and disappear the
network from their computers very quickly. If that was nsc or some other
minor site, no biggie, the net could live without us. But what if Dec's
lawyers forced them off the net? What about ATT?
A worse possible case, but less likely, is that a group of lawyers could
decide that all sites involved in the network are equally involved in the
violation because it occurred on each system. In that case, it is possible
that they would sue every company on the net, and we would have figured out
how to generate the most complicated lawsuit since they settled the IBM
anti-trust case, because we would be up to our ears in lawyers. if that
were to ever happen, I would be willing to bet that the network would be
dismantled so quickly your ears would ring.
Is that something you want to take a chance on? I'd much rather be
conservative and safe.
--
From behind the bar at Callahan's: Chuq Von Rospach
{fortune,menlo70}!nsc!chuqui (408) 733-2600 x242
If everyone marches to the beat of a different drummer,
why does mine have to use a bongo?perelgut@utcsrgv.UUCP (Stephen Perelgut) (03/21/84)
Seems to me that it would be VERY difficult to PROVE that a particular
person at a particular site really submitted any article. I can think of
many ways of making a submission look like it came from another site. But it
would be anti-social to actually post any of them, wouldn't it :-)
--
Stephen Perelgut
Computer Systems Research Group University of Toronto
Usenet: {linus, ihnp4, allegra, decvax, floyd}!utcsrgv!perelgut
CSNET: perelgut@Torontotim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) (03/21/84)
A very good article from Chuck Von Rospach. One point remains to be made on publication of proprietary source code: The copyright law includes in its "fair use" provisions an allowance for publication of short extracts from copyrighted works for critical purposes. Given this, while it would still be illeagl to publish, say, the complete source of awk(1), you would not be violating the law to publish, say, twenty lines of code for the purpose of commenting on the quality of the code, or in an article on programming styles, etc. Does anyone know if there are additional restrictions on software that would forbid this? -- Tim Maroney, The Censored Hacker mcnc!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@csnet-relay (ARPA) All opinions expressed herein are completely my own, so don't go assuming that anyone else at UNC feels the same way.
markb@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Mark Biggar) (03/23/84)
In article <6946@unc.UUCP> tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: >The copyright law includes in its "fair use" provisions an allowance for >publication of short extracts from copyrighted works for critical purposes. >Given this, while it would still be illeagl to publish, say, the complete >source of awk(1), you would not be violating the law to publish, say, twenty >lines of code for the purpose of commenting on the quality of the code, or >in an article on programming styles, etc. > >Does anyone know if there are additional restrictions on software that would >forbid this? If there are no additional restrictions on software, this provision obviously covers the standard practice of extracting the revelent code context when reporting a bug fix over the net. Mark Biggar {allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!markb