Copyright as Cudgel

kongstad writes "In an issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Siva Vaidhyanathan has some interesting things to say about the concept of Copyright: 'Back in the 20th century, if someone had accused you of copyright infringement, you enjoyed that quaint and now seemingly archaic guarantee of due process. Today, due process is a lot harder to pursue, and the burden of proof increasingly is on those accused of copyright infringement.'" A very good academic look at the recent expansions of copyright law.

Comments

Here's how it should work

[God! Awful]

1. If you publish copyrighted materials on the web, the owner should e-mail you with a cease and desist warning that unless you remove the material you will be sued.
2. If you are a search engine or portal, you should not be liable for linking to the potential copyright-violating site, so long as the case is still pending.
3. If you are a search engine/portal and you cache the material, you should be liable (and named as a co-defendant) should you choose to ignore a cease and desist warning.
4. Once a case has been settled, a search engine/portal must not link to a site or cache pages from the site that has lost the case.
5. If you are a search engine located in or serving pages to a particular country, you must obey the court rulings of that country in this regard.

-a

Re:Article slashdotted

[Violet Null]

Although I can see why a cached copy of the article in question that can be read after the website is slashdotted could be considered 'informative', perhaps next time the moderator could take the time to read the comment fully.

For instance, I highly doubt that '...has just sucked you off' appears in the original article.