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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.
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
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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).