Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 27, 2005 23:57 UTC (Mon) by zotz (guest, #26117)
Parent article: Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet)

I had a lawyer tell me that reading a web page is copyright infringement. Now, if that is so, all the browser maker/distributors may need to watch out.

Also, those browsers with File/Send Page and File/Save As may need to rethink those options.

And, come to think of it, what about Forward in all of those email clients? If I send you an email (assume there is a funny joke in it), are you gonna check with me before hitting forward? If not, that really is copyright infringement now isn't it?

Is this a bigger can of worms than anyone imagines? I imagine the ruling sould be legally astute, any ideas as to how technically astute it is?

all the best,

drew

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Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 29, 2005 1:17 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

Reading something is not copyright infringement.

Your friend is either joking or an idiot.

Perhaps he was making the assertion that the available ways of READING a web page seem to all involve COPYING it across a network, into some computer's memory, and mostly (with most browswers) into some cache somewhere, not to mention into the video RAM of the system. In some truly distorted view
that might be "copying" and one could call to question whether one had a
"right" to do so. However, human laws are not quite so absurd and some
pedants would like to claim when it suits their desire to rant about
things.

Anything posted to the public internet's "world wide web" is clearly being
published and if the only means to read those publications happens to
required some transient copies than it's obvious (even to judges) that
there's been an implicit license granted to that end.

The interesting points of contention have to do with redistribution of
that content (or derived works therefrom).

For instance if I copy LWN's contentusing a wget mirroring script and
then redistribute it from my own web server, wrapping their HTML with
my own advertising then I have almost certainly exceeded my rights (and
violated their copyright). If I distribute a browser and put my
advertising in panels or windows around all of the content I display
therein I probably haven't violated any copyrights. Even if I distribute
a skin or plug-in to Mozilla which surrounds the displayed content with
additional content (like advertising, but also like scrollbars, icons,
status bars and menus) then I'm probably okay. What if I create a greased
monkey plug-in that selectively replaces some content (references to
banner ads) with others? What if I run a cache that wraps all externally
fetched content with a corporate policy warning?

Feh!

JimD

Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 29, 2005 22:53 UTC (Wed) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

Reading something with a browser probably is since it made a copy of the document on your hard drive in it's cache.

Posted Jun 30, 2005 4:56 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

> Reading something is not copyright infringement.
> Your friend is either joking or an idiot.

Sadly, many legislative and judicial decisions, in the US and elsewhere, foster the idea that reading something on a computer *is* invoking copyright, and is thus copyright infringement if done without license. The bits are copied from a storage medium into the computer's memory, thus copyright is invoked -- so the logic goes.