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

Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 29, 2005 1:17 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256)
In reply to: Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet) by zotz
Parent article: Supreme Court rules against file swapping (ZDNet)

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

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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.