Re: Licence to view source code.

Greg MacGowan <greg.macgowan[_at_]law.uc.edu> wrote:
>
> To this I would add that by deleting the electronic file, there is
> still only one copy of the work, and that the printed copy is the
> first that is not of a transitory nature (this assumes that copies
> in RAM are not fixed. Hardly a safe assumption on my part).

Given proxy servers and local caches, I doubt whether ALL of the electronic copies are sufficiently transitory for the purposes of US copyright law. I believe there are at least two reproductions made when a Web document is printed, (1) the electronic copy stored locally and (2) the paper copy.

> I will also grant you that I am taking a VERY broad view, perhaps
> unhealthily so, of implied license on the Internet.

I disagree. The implied licence is based on the reasonable expectation of the person who makes their copyright work available on the Web and that of the person who views it.

Web users typically view a large number of pages creating local and proxy server copies, and print a few for their own personal use (or to share with friends). This pattern of behaviour on the Internet predates the Web by a long time. The Web simply provided a nice user interface to make it easy to do.

Effective publication to the Web user has to allow these copies to be made so I believe permission to make these copies must be implicitly granted by making the work available. I would even go as far as to say that, unless attention is brought to the user before they select the page to view, that the copyright owner is overriding that implicit licence by a more restrictive explicit one, then that licence cannot effect the status of those copies. There is no guarantee that having down-loaded a page, that the user will read it before printing it.

Now the sharing with friends amounts to a further publication. That is a separate right of the copyright owner. The owner has chosen to publish to that friend using the Web and has every right to prevent a person's first impression of their web page being based on a printout which may not have all the bells and whistles of the electronic version (i.e. black and white, no animation or sound etc). An explicit licence may grant a licence to distribute paper copies but I don't think the implied licence can stretch that far.

Tim Arnold-Moore, LL.B. (Melb)        | Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT  |
tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au  B.Sc.(Hons Melb) | 723 Swanston St    -----------------
Tel: +61 3 9282 2487   Fax: ..2490    | Carlton 3053       |  simul iustus 
    http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/People/Tja/tja.html         |   et peccator