> Okay, let's say a company owns the copyright to a story, and places
> the text in a PDF, no copyright claims or anything, anywhere in the text
> (i'm just being thorough, i don't think it matters).
> The PDF was intentionally made with no PDF security on it, such that
> copying, printing, extraction, etc, are allowed. This was an intentional
> choice, but done for technical reasons.
> A web master, acting within his job description at that company, uploads
> this PDF text to a non-password protected website that says absolutely
> nothing, anywhere.
>
> A google search robot discovers it, and google searches related to the
> text in the PDF find it, and people can download it and make copies.
>
> Has the company abandoned copyright in that PDF?
No. They have licenced others to produce copies by downloading from their site, but they have not licenced others to make additional copies beyond that.
> I'd imagine you'd say no.
> But let's look at what Nimmer said:
> "the copyright owner must have clearly manifested that intention through
> some affirmative act."
>
> First, they intentionally chose not to disallow copying and printing.
No, they chose to allow it from their site only -- a decision which they could
reverse or constrain at any time.
> This was an affirmative act on their part (though not necessarily an
> intention to abandon copyright)
> Second, the web master has also performed an affirmative act. He
> intentionally placed the file on the non-password protected website,
> available to all, with nothing anywhere saying it was copyrighted. This
> was an affirmative act, and to me, these two affirmative acts combined
> demonstrates a clearly manifested intention to abandon copyright.
> To you, it might not.
No. It clearly manifests an intention to grant a limited licence to make a single copy. (More precisely to make the copies necessary to transmit the item to the machine in question, and perhaps to make additional local copies on that machine).
> So how explicit must they be?
> To whom, exactly, must they be explicit to?
You are confusing a licence with abandonment. Abandonment would occur if something written said "This work is hereby placed into the public domain".
A license is the exercise of the authority right in 17 USC 106. A simple license to copy can even be given verbally, although the evidenciary burden is on the licensee to demonstrate the facts leading him to believe he had a licence, and then it is up to the court to apply the law to those facts. The law in question is usually the UCC, which tells the judge to examine "usage of trade", which I advocate would include referencing the W3C standards that definine the meaning of an HTTP transaction in such a way that it becomes a form of simple copyright licence.
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