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Share a News Story With Coworkers, Pay a Fine
An anonymous reader sends us to InfoWorld for news that Knowledge Networks, an analyst firm, has settled a copyright complaint, agreeing to pay the Software and Information Industry Association $300,000 for sharing copyrighted news articles internally with employees.
This is old news, of a sort, in the scientific community. More than a decade ago it was settled that corporate libraries couldn't blithely photocopy and distribute copyrighted journal articles they'd purchased one copy of. Part of the decision was based on the fact that it is was already quite easy then for a large library to turn over fees for single reprints--that was part of business model of copyright holders.
This seems to more obviously infringing in some ways, so I'm not surprised it's also a copyright violation. Routine, organized corporate redistribution of content--roughly the equivalent of getting one subscription to a newspaper and photocopying it for all your employees.
.. and this is slightly off-topic but wouldn't this kind of silly lawsuit where it is settled out of court would be a wonderful way to transfer money from one company to another without paying any taxes (surely if you're receiving damages then they would not be taxed as you would have (arguably) already suffered a (n albeit intangible) loss of similar or greater value which should more than offset the tax burden of the settlement. I am not an accountant but.... :)
You are no Wally, Maximum Prophet. If you were, you will post Dilbert strips in your own office and rat on your employer to collect that six grand. If the employer tries to collect that money from you, you would dodge it by saying the company had no explicit policy prohibiting it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Even further than that, the company in question is basically a company that sells information (their analysis of other information) and would probably be very quick to complain if thier product was being distributed beyond paying customers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Copyright is supposed to promote progress by helping new ideas to be spread as widely as possible, so they can be picked up and built upon by others. That's how progress happens, by incremental steps, each new idea standing on the shoulders of those that came before. Copyright specifically protects only the expression, not the ideas, so it's not necessary to wait until the term expires before you can incorporate the interesting ideas into your own work.
But the brain-dead way we apply the concept of copyright to software does not allow such sharing of ideas, not at any other than the very coarsest level. Not only that, by applying copyright protections to binaries, current application of the law enables infringement.
The authors of the constitution, of course, could never have envisioned an environment in which it was possible to both publish your work *and* keep it secret. How can an author of a book publish without revealing his sentence structure, word choice, characters, plot line, etc.? But with software, it's not only possible but common to publish your software in an opaque, binary-only form that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to read your work and understand the clever ideas you may have used.
Even worse, software that is published only in binary format need *never* see the light of day, not even when the copyright expires. No one will ever be able to use that code to build something else, even if it is in the public domain, because the source was never published. It's not even necessary to give your source to the Library of Congress when you register the copyright.
In my ideal world, I would grant copyright protection to software if and only if the source code were published. Executables would be covered as well, of course, but coverage could only be obtained by publishing the source so that recipients can study and learn from it. They can't copy it, of course, or even compile it (since that would be creation of a derived work), but they can learn from it and use the ideas all they like, promoting progress in the Art and Science of software development. As a side benefit any literal copying of source code without the copyright holder's permission would become much easier to identify and track. Those who have reason to keep their source code secret would not be eligible for copyright, but they could still rely on contract and trade secret law for protection.
It'll never happen, of course, but IMNSHO, that's how it *should* be.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I'm not sure how this could be illegal.
A company is a single legal entity, right? (Okay, we'll ignore subsidaries and parents for the moment, let's just "yes").
If this was an individual, buying a magazine and then photocopying pages--but not distributing them--there wouldn't be a snowball in hell's chance of a case.
The parallel applies: the company wasn't redistributing articles; despite the spurious use of "distributing", "making copies available only within the company" is not distribution in the copyright sense. It created copies, and gave them to itself.
Even in the software world there's nothing legally preventing you from this (you might be prevented through license terms from using--or even installing--more than one copy simultaneously, but there's nothing stopping you from making the copy in the first place).
Had this gone to court, I'd be surprised if the outcome had gone the same way.
This is old-school copyright infringement. Nothing to see here, move along. You cannot reproduce copyrighted material in its entirety and distribute it to hundreds of people. Charging for the copies doesn't matter. Way back around 1980, a professor of mine was doing something similar with articles from science magazines. He created a reader for one of his classes and distributed it to his students. We had to pick it up at the university's copy center. He got into trouble with the copyright holders. You have to get permission to reprint articles. This is only a little work, and, depending on the articles, only a little money (though a few copyright owners will try to screw you by jacking up the price - solution, leave that article out).