Re: copyright under stress

On Thu, Jun 22, 2000, Robert Cumbow <rcumbow[_at_]grahamdunn.com> wrote:
>
> That's not the way the No Electronic Theft Act is applied. If you
> have one unauthorized book on your site, it doesn't matter if you get
> 40,000 hits or 40 million hits -- as long as at least 10 copies are
> made of the unauthorized work, the NET Act applies. Each individual
> work infringed (not each copy made) is one act of infringement. If
> the book has a retail value of, say, $30, you're nowhere near being
> subject to the criminal penalties of the NET Act. (You'd still be
> liable to the copyright owner in a civil action, of course.) The
> aggregate retail value of all of the individual unauthorized works
> made available on your site must reach or exceed the NET Act threshold
> before the criminal penalties will apply. The actual number of people
> who access your site and copy those works need only be 10 or more.
> Specifically, you would need to post copyrighted works whose total
> aggregate retail value exceeds $2,500 in any one 180-day period, AND
> at least 10 copies of each of those works would have to be downloaded,
> before the NET Act would apply. So if you posted, say, 150 infringing
> books on your site, you might be getting close. On the other hand,
> you could reach the same retail value threshold by offering as few as
> a dozen unauthorized software programs.

Thanks for this information. I didn't think of the "retail value" as being price per copy, but rather the value of the book to the copyright holder if she were to sell the book. In the case of many of my books, they are not in print and so "retail value" is rather nebulous -- I suppose the "retail value" to a rare book collector might be different, though -- does that make a difference?

And I wonder how to apply this reasoning to something like the DeCSS code, which is said to be covered by copyright -- one would have difficulty in placing a "retail value" on it since it is not sold separately to consumers.

Do you think I could use your argument as a defense, or might a judge be inclined to conclude that the "greater the copying, the greater the offense?"

-- 
"Eric"  Eric Eldred  Eldritch Press
mailto:Eldred[_at_]EldritchPress.org
http://www.eldritchpress.org/EricEldred.vcf