On Sun, 14 May 1995 17:39:49 -0300 (ADT), Rory Mc Greal wrote:
>The Copyright Sub-Committee of the Canadian Information Highway Advisory
>Council is recommending THAT owners of BBSs be held LIABLE for all
>postings on their boards.  I understand that the definition of BBS would
>include listservs, computer conferences, MOOs etc.
 
I'm curious as to how Canada or the US would enfoce such a provision for
newsgroups, forums, whathave you that originate outside their borders (in
countries that agree that such a policy is absurd)?
 
Claims of copyright violation are civil, correct?  So, if someone wants to
protest copyright violation on a message received from a server halfway
around the world, pursuing the claim would be likely to cost more than a
damage award would net even if the pursuit is successful.
 
Who does one go after if the alleged violation was posted to a NETNEWS
group (as I understand it, those groups don't have a "location" in the
sense of a LISTSERV list)?
 
It strikes me that what the regulators are looking for here is a mechanism
for making it for more diffult than at present for copyright software
(whether Microsoft Weird or someone's interactive CD-ROM based novel) to be
made available from WAN servers.
 
There have been instances when copyright software has been (usually
inadvertently, in some sense) posted to Internet software archives.
Responsible archivists quickly remove such programs and I know of no case
where the copyright holder then attempted to blame the archivist for the
problem.
 
However, we also have been confronted with a few instances of ftp sites
with hardly anything other than commercial software.  If an ftp site has
all of Microsoft Office, PageMaker, PhotoShop, Harvard Graphics and similar
popular titles, isn't it a little disengenous for the sysop to claim total
innocence (I don't know of any instance where all that commercial stuff had
been simultaneously posted only hours before a complaint arose)?
 
The usual means by which industry avoids being shackled by ineptly
structured regulations (the US Congress once proposed that all canned soup
contain the same amount by weight; since creamed soup is denser than broth,
the result would have been MANY different canned sizes with an increase in
all sorts of costs that ultimately consumers would have paid) is to work
WITH regulators to structure rules that narrowly target legitimate
problems.
 
Off the-top-of-my-head, I haven't such a precise solution to offer (I claim
no skills as an author of regulations), but it seems clear to me that it
could be helpful if we'd think about how to constrain massive and
relatively permanent (such as an archive site) unathorized storage of
copyright material without threatening the free flow of ideas (does there
need to be some electronic equivalent for the "fair use" doctrine?).
 
My friends in the library wrestle with this issue at length.  Ultimately,
the goal is to make it possible to "check out" a work electronically as
easily as one can physically.  In practice, it's not easy to see how to
make that happen.
 
Another thought strikes me on this subject.  Historically, it was darned
difficult to eke out a living on the basis of intellectual property.  There
simply weren't that many patrons supporting artists and musicians (even
Mozart made FAR less in real terms than any of today's moderately
successful recording artists).  Mass communication and distribution
radically changed all that and now (some) artists make absurd sums (not
that I begrudge Madonna the income, but Mozart she's not :).  It strikes me
that much of the lamenting about copyright and the Information Superhighway
(and other things, for example Garth Brooks totally naive stand on the
resale of CD recordings or the recording industry's panic about digital
audio tape recorders) results from the fact that technology capable of
simultaneously mass copying and distributing creates the prospect of
reducing incomes to their historic state.
 
Although the massive incomes accruing to some producers of intellectual
property is a recent aberration of historic precedent, I don't propose
reversion to the incomes of former times, but it does seem to me that it's
time we all recognized that the supply and demand consequences of
technology are real and not entirely subject to the wishes of regulators.
That technology from roughly World War II to the present has massively
favored (and handful of) producers of intellectual property, but the
technology currently coming available is MUCH more favorable to consumers.
As a result, regardless of regulatory interference that will have a very
high capacity for unintended consequences, future incomes for producers of
intellectual property WILL be reduced to levels commensurate with other
forms of economic production.  Or "Gee will it be that hard to live on a 6
figure income instead of a 7 figure income?"
 
Note: this is a piece of massively distributed intellectual property--for
what it's worth ;-)
 
/s Murph Sewall                                 (203) 486-2489 voice
   Marketing Department                         (203) 486-5246 fax