Re: copyright of internet postings

Lorraine has raised an intersting issue regarding the meaning of publication re internet useage. In the UK s 175 (1)(b) of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides publication includes making the information available to the public on an electronic retreival system. Presumably this would include the internet, though there is no reported authority on this point in the UK that I know of. Caselaw in the UK suggests that for their to be a publication in general the number of copies issued to the public must be more than "merely colourable" and their needs to be some element of satisfying reasonable public demand in the publication eg Francis Day v Hunter [1914] 2 Ch 728, however, listservers obviously were'nt around then but I would have thought that copies issued to the public would have included distributed by listserv, provided the members of the list can come within what the court perceives to be "the public". Even if there was still some doubt on this issue the fact that the CNi copyright archive gopher is freely accessable via the internet would almost certainly amount to a publication, at least in UK law.

Mark Wing, Southampton Institute, UK
<wing_m[_at_]southampton-institute.ac.uk> Received on Tue Mar 19 1996 - 13:57:24 GMT