"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 08:44:01 -0500, "Ted Byers"
wrote in Message-Id:
:

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .

[snip]
It's simple; works that contain _no_ copyright notice are not
copyrighted.

This isn't correct. Ray posted a quote from the US Copyright office
website
that states that copyright exists from the moment the copyrighted work is
created.

Perhaps you and Ray are correct. I haven't done the research to
verify that.

I'm happy to see that neither you nor anyone else has challenged my
contention that because the photographs are NOT being copied, there is
no copyright infringement in the example at hand.

Whether or not the pictures are copied is debatable, since a copy must be
generated at some point in order for the image to be viewable by the visitor
to the site. Maybe that is a gray area that needs better definition. This
would not be a surprise since the technology of the Internet and what is
possible seems to be well ahead of what existing law can handle.

All of the text posted in this newsgroup is therefore copyrighted,
even though folk rarely, if ever, attempt to protect such copyrighted
material.

If that is correct, Google Groups has failed to pay me any royalty for
archiving and redistributing my usenet articles. I wonder how Google
gets away with "illegally" copying and redistributing all those usenet
articles without a having to defend themselves against a myriad of
tort suits. :-)

Probably because the vast majority of copyright holders for the material
they archive don't care about their rights to the material they posted.

Certainly, though, anyone who produces copyrighted work has a
right to place restrictions on how that work can be used.

If said producer places his work on the WWW for public access,
hansen't he implicitly abrogated the right to control the viewing of
it? How could s/he provide public access and then cry foul when the
work is publicly accessed. Such a policy would seem to create a
public nuisance.

No, definitely not.

I don't know if you're a software developer or not, but either way, you may
want to visit www.gnu.org and take a look at their various licenses for gnu
projects. For all gnu projects, the source code is readily available to
anyone who wants to look at it and/or compile or modify it. However, the
license to do so places significant limitations on what can be done with it.
For example, IF i were to use a GNU library, the license would require me to
distribute my software with source code (or at least object code for my work
and source for the library used). It is the license under which copyrighted
material that determines whether or not a given work can be used for a given
purpose, and it is the fact that the copyright owner owns the copyright that
gives him the right to specify the terms under which his work is
distributed. It is, in fact, why I generally do not use Gnu libraries in my
own projects, because I will not accept the restrictions on the consequent
distribution of my own work. I DO use Gnu software, though, because it is
generally of very good quality.

Since I own copyright on all the software I develop, I have a right to
specify the terms of the license to which you must agree in order to make
use of it. Now, in my case, you'd have to pay a license fee, but in
principle, the same thing applies to to copyrighted material that is
distributed without a licensing fee.

Many companies that develop software development tools provide versions of
their software for a nominal fee, if any, with the license stipulating that
the trial version may be used only for evaluation purposes, or in some
cases, development purposes, and require a different license with very
different licensing fees when you switch your activity from development to
distribution. Oracle, one of the leading database developers has made their
software available for free to developers, and I recently downloaded their
latest product. However, the license stipulates that I can use it only for
development. If I decide to use it to deploy a database product, however,
I, or my client, would have to obtain a different license and pay many
thousands of dollars for a license fee. The development version is exactly
the same as the production version; it must be in order to relaibly develop
new products using it, but what you can do with it is strictly determined by
the license to which you must agree in order to install it.

[snip]
The methods your creative genius has imagined seem very valid; in fact
it was I who suggested IP filtering to control access from "offending"
sites in a previous followup article..
Good. ;-)

I work as a software developer and have been studying and experimenting with
different means of protecting copyrighted material that is published on the
web for a number of years now. ;-) But fully fledged
development/implementation/deployment is an expensive proposition and to
date I have found few willing to go to the expense of doing it right. While
IP filtering is relatively easy, a website owner could be facing costs of
many tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly up into six or seven figures
(depending on the scale required), to do it thoroughly and well.

I agree, it is the
responsibility of the photographer to _directly_ control the content
s/he provides the public, as opposed to crying 'theft' when the
photographs s/he has made publicly accessible are in fact accessed by
the public.

I only half agree here. It is up to the producer to actively protect his
property, but I would maintain that copyright violation is a form of theft,
regardless of the way in which the copyright violation occurs. It seems
insignificant to me whether the violation is in terms of someone
photocopying parts of a book or journal article (though note, some
publications expressly permit some copying for personal/academic fair use),
or making an illegal copy of my software or using my software in a way not
expressly permitted by the license I have chosen to use.

Actually, in many cases, the least expensive option for protecting copyright
is to implement your own security, and in many others, the threat of legal
action may be the least expensive. It all depends on how much paterial
needs protection, the nature or peculiarities of your local legal system
(e.g. how long will the proceedings take and how many thousands of dollars
per day will your lawyers charge). I would expect that a mixed approach is
most likely to be optimal, with the owner investing a few tens of thousands
of dollars on security measures and being willing to risk legal fees should
someone risk legal action and break into the site anyway. Whatever the
copyright owner does will depend on how much value he places on his
copyright and how far he is willing to go to protect it.

And I still submit, that because no actual copying of the photographs
has taken place, there is no copyright infringement perpetrated by the
eBay seller who embeds links to another's photographs in his eBay
auction page.

In this instance, it is not the making of a physical copy that matters but
rather the violation of the terms of use specified on the website that
matters. Mind you, I would recommend that the owner of copyrighted material
maintain a gateway page through which any visitor to the website must pass
in order to view the copyrighted material, and on the gateway page, spell
out in detail what the permitted uses are, and do not allow further requests
browsing deeper into the website until the visitor specifically agrees to
the license. This would apply regardless of whether or not any fees are
requested.

Cheers,

Ted