Thomas Workman <tworkman[_at_]erols.com> wrote:
>
> John Lederer <johnl[_at_]ibm.net> wrote:
> >
> > Would you like to take a stab at explicating why someone taking
> > something off the web violates copyright, but your repeating of the
> > entirety of Brigid's message does not?
>
> Fair use. When one sends an Email, one issues a fair use license for
> others to forward it withor without comment.
Aren't you confusing two very separate issues: fair use and licence. Fair use is a statutory exception/defence to infringement and is determined primarily by the conduct of the potential infringer (and the nature of the work).
On the other hand, a (unilateral) licence is granted by conduct of the copyright owner.
In the case of the web, in order to make any use at all of a page posted on the web a user must make copies in some form or another. There has to be an implied licence to copy the page given simply by placing a page on the web in such a way as to encourage people to access it. The terms of that licence are less certain, determined by the way the page's existence is publicized, the context in which access is given, and common usage of web pages. Most pages are placed in unrestricted circumstances with broad encouragement to everybody to access them. The normal use of the pages including viewing, linking, caching (either locally or in a proxy), indexing and probably printing a copy for personal use and linking using frames ;-) should have been anticipated by the owner and their conduct suggests that they are providing a unilateral licence to the world to do all of these things (we can probably quibble about the boundaries of this licence but not its existence).
> That is the nature of the medium. One gives a license for a web
> browser to "copy" the web page so that antoher can view it with their
> browser. That "copying" is fair use.
No, that copying is permitted by the copyright owner. Whether or not it is statutory fair use is a separate (and largely irrelevant) question.
> Copying the web page, or major parts of it, so that they become
> part of another's work -- is INFRINGEMENT, and not fair use.
I would have to agree with this as a general statement although there may be particular exceptions which are fair use.
> Linking to a web page is a more complicated issue.
It is almost certainly not a copyright infringement but it may infringe trademark and allied rights.
-- | Tim Arnold-Moore, LL.B., B.Sc. (Hons) | Postal address: Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT | 723 Swanston St | Carlton 3053 | AUSTRALIA | Tel: +61 3 9282 2487 | Fax: +61 3 9282 2490 | simul iustus et peccator <tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au>Received on Fri Jul 17 1998 - 00:15:37 GMT
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