copyright? [LWN.net]

copyright?

Posted Jan 3, 2008 5:49 UTC (Thu) by pjm (subscriber, #2080)
In reply to: Regulatory solution, not technical, is required by dskoll
Parent article: The future of unencrypted web traffic

An ISP that modifies web pages that pass through it may well be in breach of the copyright of
the page author.  They have an implicit license to redistribute the unmodified page, but I
believe do not have any license to redistribute adaptations/derived works of that page.

This presumably applies to all transcoding proxies and other non-transparent proxies too.  The
only differences I can think of is that adding advertizing is “for commercial advantage”, and
that copyright owners may be more likely to sue someone for adding/changing/removing
advertisements than other modifications.

I must note that IANAL, and in fact I'm rather less sure about the above than most things I
might say about copyright.

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Surprisingly enough it's quite clear in U.S.

Posted Jan 3, 2008 13:49 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

You can read yourself:
In general terms, section 512(a) limits the liability of service providers in circumstances where the provider merely acts as a data conduit, transmitting digital information from one point on a network to another at someone else’s request. This limitation covers acts of transmission, routing, or providing connections for the information, as well as the intermediate and transient copies that are made automatically in the operation of a network.

In order to qualify for this limitation, the service provider’s activities must meet the following conditions:

The transmission must be initiated by a person other than the provider.
The transmission, routing, provision of connections, or copying must be carried out by an automatic technical process without selection of material by the service provider.
The service provider must not determine the recipients of the material.
Any intermediate copies must not ordinarily be accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and must not be retained for longer than reasonably necessary.
The material must be transmitted with no modification to its content.

If you are selecting and changing content then you are losing this protection and need special permission from Google (and other web sites) to operate...