Re: New ways to evade copyright law (was Re: Vicarious liblity (was: KDE not in Debian?))
On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 10:45:09AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> Apparently, some people think that the introduction of some new
> distribution mechanism will confuse the people who enforce copyright
> law think that distribution isn't happening.
>
> So, let's say that I come up with a new way of distributing text:
>
> I'll send all the vowels in one file (it will be downloaded from the
> web), I'll send all the consonants in a set of different files (one per
> consonant -- they will be emailed), and I'll send the punctuation in a
> third file (it will be posted as news).
>
> And, let's say that I include enough meta-information in these files
> such that they will just happen to combine themselves to create the
> original text. No one file, taken individually, could be mistaken for
> a copyrighted work -- only by taking the files as a group which would be
> pieced together by individual effort could I be said to be distributing
> a copyrighted work.
>
> Do people think that would be legal?
>
> If not, why not?
>
Breaking a copyrighted work up into little bits and distributing them
individually doesn't help you evade copyright. If you don't have permission
to distribute, no matter how small you make the pieces you'll still be
distributing a substantial amount of the work and thus infringing the
copyright.
Distributing two separate works for which you have authorization, on the
other hand, is perfectly ok even if you don't have permission to distribute
the combination of the two. Any combination of those works would be done by
the end user. Only if the end user chooses to distribute the result would
they (not you) be in violation of the copyright.
--
Brian Ristuccia
brianr@osiris.978.org
bristucc@nortelnetworks.com
bristucc@cs.uml.edu
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