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