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Corporations, CDs and Click Thru Licensing Loopholes?
"What if there was a peer to peer service that had a click through license of some sort that made each user a member of the corporation. The user uploads a CD and it becomes property of the corporation. The user retains the original CD as a distributed back up for the corporation. In return for this service (providing a safe place to store the physical CD, using their harddrive space to store backup copies, using the user's bandwidth to distribute these backups to be backed up etc.) the corporation lets the users occasionally listen to that music and other music the corporation owns as a form of payment.
Users are not receiving a service (downloadable music) they are providing a service (storing digital music for a corporation). They are employees of the corporation that get paid by the right to listen to the music.
This would only work if corporation was non-profit and decentralized, a co-operative of some kind without any ability to have control taken of it by someone who would then try to collect its property (the CD's)."
just remember to keep your internal corporate lan disconnected from the internet, and hence out of the reach of the riaa goons
I have 'backup' space I would like to donate, please sign me up! :)
No I didnt spell check this post...
All software in my company that requires registration is given the name "everybody" and organisation "everywhere".
Maily this is done so we don't get outdated information there when people leaving the company, or the business name changes, but I suppose it might enable legal reselling beyond the shrink-wrap's (highly questionable) restrictions, since the software proudly proclaims "this product is licenced to everybody everywhere" when it loads.
One minor flaw with this is that one unfortunate PHB didn't notice that these were his defaults, and ended up with the e-mail address "anybody@msn.com" - you wouldn't believe number of clueless e-mail complaints and dumb-ass tech support requests that got sent to that address in the brief time that we had it!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Fortunately, this is not true.
I doubt your idea would truly go far. The argument, as I guess it to be, would be that when the corporation makes a copy for the member to play, it would be creating a copy which is *not* for the purpose of backup. That copy would be infringing on the copyright owner's right, and the corporation would have broken the law.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
However, if the corporation owns a copy of a CD, then only one person can listen at once, otherwise it becomes a 'performance', which you haven't bought the rights to when you buy a CD. However if you only allow one person to listen then that may be ok (but then you're talking about a library copy- IRC there may be different terms for those.)
Secondly, you can't deploy it across the organisation, say with P2P; because you don't have a license to do that- that would be a copy, and the copyright holder has a monopoly on allowing people to do that.
IANAL
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"In Holland you have to pay BUMA-STEMRA if you let your employees listen to music, even if you are a non-profit organisation.
-- Cheers!
The reason that copying CDs is illegal is that they are copyrighted, and copying and transmitting copyrighted works without the author's permission (except in cases of "fair use") is illegal. Though a corporation is certainly welcome to build a CD library and loan out physical CDs to its employees, copying them digitally is just a plain ol' copyright violation.
Even if a corporation purchases it, it's still a single liscense and you're not entitled to the right to back it up under the DMCA.
Are the moderators using some sort of filtering for approving Ask Slashdot questions? Seems like if you have DMCA in the question, it automatically gets approved.
Nice idea, but it won't work. You are up against two legal problems: an employee and an employer are separate people; and the employment relationship is a non-trivial contract.
You are right in saying that corporations are juristic persons and can own property. Many corporations own licenses for software, for example. But to allow employees to use those licenses, the license must be assigned to a specific employee.
This is still a legal minefield: some licenses have conditions regarding assignment to other persons, duration of assignment, or even assignment to an instrument (a particular computer). It is generally recognised that an employer has the right to assign property to an employee for use in the course of his/her job, and to reassign that property as dictated by operational requirements. This constitutes fair use on the part of the purchaser.
But fair use and assignment do not give the employer the right to allow unrestricted or simultaneous use of intellectual property that is not owned by the employer (i.e. IP that has been purchased, such as a book, CD, or software).
The same is true for members of corporations -- the relationship between the corporation and a member is still a relationship between different persons having legal status, so a right afforded to a corporation does not necessarily extend to a member of that corporation.
The second problem regards the incorporation or employment. To say the least, a click-through "I agree to be employed" is not sufficient. No court will find that the contract of employment is valid unless the employer is clearly employing, and the employee is being employed and remunerated. While the latter may be true in this case, the former is not satisfied. Similarly the incorporation of a company does not occur on an ad-hoc basis; there are legal procedures that must be followed to introduce members.
Even then, you have to contend with the fact that may people in IT have contracts that prevent them from having other jobs at the same time ... not to mention that this practice is questionable under common law.
Any scheme of this nature ultimately comes down to being some sort of (non-sanctioned) library, and therefore illegal under the basic provisions of copyright. Even if you DID find a way to do it, the courts would also certainly find that you are attempting to circumvent the law, and respond appropriately.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
How about putting a click through license on the p2p's that makes it illegal for the RI/MPAA to connect to any p2p. Or anyone looking to give/sell information to the MPAA/RIAA, in addition to any law enforcement officials. That way when they have any information in court, they can be sued as well for breaking the click through license.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Well, I guess this means that a shell corporation could be created with all the hardware manufacturers as members. Any hardware vendor who wants their stuff well-supported under Linux but doesn't want to release the source. The new Line-ucks Corporation can then hire 'employees' at a nominal salary of, say seven cents a decade. These 'employees' would then contribute $80 each to the break room coffee fund and get their copy of the binaries of the new closed-source Line-ucks Operating systems.
EmmPeeThree Corporation could also be formed, either as a seperate body or a subsidiary. The subsidiary idea might be best, as then they can share a common corporate logo, featuring a drifter-sort giving the finger to a bearded hippie and his guitar-playing buddy.
Looks like people didn't even catch on to this April Fools post. Hehe.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Employees or stockholders, either way, your problem won't be the RIAA or the MPAA, it'll be all the expense, accounting, and paperwork necessary to place a monetary value on that "pay" and figure out just which laws, rules, and regulations govern it. All of this just to pacify the IRS (and any state and municipal bodies which decide to get in on the act).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.