Charging the net....

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <PBX8114w164w at mantis.co.uk> mathew at mantis.co.uk (mathew) writes:
> woods at robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) writes:
> > Brad, if you send me a free copy of a book, I can do any number of
> > things with it while steadfastly holding to the Copyright Act. [...]
> > it in any work of my own.  I can totally destroy it.  I can photocopy
> > it and put the original away for safe-keeping.        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> No you can't. That's breaking copyright law, and is explicitly prohibited in
> the copyright notices on most books.

First, copyright notices never give the authors any rights. They're just
notices---you can get more money for a copyright violation if you gave
the offender notice of his violation. They carry no other legal weight,
are traditionally worded much too strongly (though it's always better
safe than sorry), and really don't have anything to do with the issue at
hand.

Second, whether or not you can photocopy a book and put away the
original, the courts have explicitly ruled that you can make various
kinds of copies of software without infringing copyright. That includes
archival copies. So Greg's point is right even if his analogy is flawed.

Finally, I'm not familiar with any court decisions on whether
photocopying a book and putting away the original qualifies as fair use.
All the fair use guidelines apply, except the usual 2500-word limit; and
it's easy to imagine a court allowing this as fair use anyway, since the
author isn't losing any money.

> >                                                  I can give away the
> > photocopy and destroy the original.
> You can't do that, either. "This book is sold subject to the condition that
> it shall not [...be...] circulated [...] in any form of binding or cover
> other than that in which it is published."

Again, what the copyright notice says has nothing to do with the law. If
it was legal to make the photocopy, then it is legal to give it away
along with all other existing copies.

> > Shareware, as distributed across Usenet, cannot exist in practice,
> > since the "license" it is shipped with is un-enforcable.
> In what sense?  It has already been enforced on occasion -- I have read that
> companies have been forced to pay up for shareware they have copied -- so
> your claim that it is "unenforcable" is curious.

A Federal district court in Louisiana held shrink-wrap licenses to be
unenforceable; several lower courts have said the same thing; and the
prevailing attitude in the courts seems to be ``no signature means no
contract.'' There is no reason to believe that breaking the shrink-wrap
forces you into a contract---especially when, as on USENET, there's no
shrink-wrap! There are many reasons to believe that the unsolicited gift
regulations apply.

> In the case of much PC shareware, the uncompress process displays a banner
> message proclaiming that the program is shareware and telling you to consult
> the license before running it.

If you have legally acquired the software, then you may legally unpack
it, compile it, and run it, no matter what notices you're served after
the fact. There is an entire section of regulations saying that you can
do what you have to do to make the software run.

> For free, yes; you can give a book to a friend. For profit, no; you can't
> lend a book, hire it out or re-sell it. Not legally, anyway;

Uh, read the law. You can do what the First Sale doctrine says you can
do. The situation is slightly different for you in the UK, but the vast
majority of USENET sites are still in the United States.

---Dan