Re: PDF files on company Intranet?

On Thu, Jan 13, 2000, Staffan Teste <teste[_at_]blf.se> wrote:
>
> On 12 January 2000, Greg Erkins <gerkins[_at_]gci.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 11, 2000, Michael Sowinski <msowinski[_at_]dpra.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > I would really appreciate a word of advice. Several newsletters that
> > > my company subscribes to have begun to offer their periodicals via
> > > electronic delivery services, such as PDF. If my company, which
> > > includes 8 offices nationwide and one in Canada, stores those PDF
> > > files on our company Intranet site where they could be accessed by
> > > all of our offices, would we be infringing?
> >
> > Acrobat 4.06 Reader is available for anyone to download. You can get
> > it at http://www.adobe.com/ for free and acknowledgement of their
> > license agreement. Acrobat Writer 4.06 cost anywhere from $99 for
> > an upgrade to $279 for a new program. Adobe gives the Reader away
> > so anyone can read what is created by their Writer which they charge
> > for, which also includes their Acrobat Distiller, which can generate
> > complicated pages with graphics etc. They also charge for Photoshop,
> > PageMaker, Illustrator, In-Design and a lot of other products that
> > can be view at http://www.adobe.com/store/products/main.html. It
> > would be poor marketing to not give away the reader that allows the
> > viewing of all the created works by their other products. So the
> > non-lawyer, layman, answer is you could store any PDF document
> > anywhere, but to create them you need a licensed copy of the Writer.
>
> About storage I must object.
>
> If there are copyright material on the pdf-file you really are passing
> the law when you share the material. To store is the same as making a
> copy and it is only the workowner that has the exclusive right to make
> copies.
>
> So before storing you have to ask if you can do that. It is not allowed
> to put coptrightmaterial on Intranet or internal net or databases
> without geting a license or a permission to do so.

I assumed the company had the right to have the PDF file in the first place and permission from the copyright holder or was the copywriter author. In no case should anyone copy say, Time magazine, because they have the ability to do so using Adobe Writer and put it on a company intranet for all personnel to read. But under fair use, and use of specific articles in say, Time magazine, may become a different answer. What is so efficient with Adobe Writer and other programs like it is the ability to bookmark and hyperlink. In fact I would be happy to have a subscription to a magazine that was easy to hyperlink and bookmark to and if they do not have them now, they will in the very near future.

Just another 2:00 am AST thought

Greg Erkins
http://www.emailrealty.com/
<gerkins[_at_]gci.net> Received on Fri Jan 14 2000 - 11:04:17 GMT