Slashdot Mirror
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.
Analyst firm Knowledge Networks has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a complaint that it distributed news articles to its employees without permission of the copyright owners, a trade group announced Thursday.
The Knowledge Networks settlement is the first under the Software & Information Industry Association's Corporate Content Anti-Piracy Program, launched in October.
Knowledge Networks' marketing group had been distributing press packets to some employees on a regular basis, the SIIA said. Those packets contained articles under copyright and owned by SIIA members such as the Associated Press, United Press International, and publishing company Reed Elsevier, the trade group said.
SIIA litigation counsel Scott Bain called Knowledge Networks a "reputable company that made a very costly mistake." One of SIIA's goals for the settlement is to deter copyright infringement and educate other companies about the need for compliance programs, he said.
A Knowledge Networks spokesman declined to talk about the case in detail. "We are happy the matter has been resolved amicably," said spokesman Dave Stanton.
Knowledge Networks, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has agreed to take steps to avoid further problems, including sending its staff to an SIIA copyright course, SIIA said.
In a statement distributed by SIIA, Knowledge Networks said it regretted the actions.
"[We] disseminated copies of relevant newspaper and magazine articles in the good faith belief that it was lawful to do so," the company said in the statement. "We now understand that practice may violate the copyright rights of those publications. We regret that those violations may have occurred and we are pleased that this matter has now been resolved."
Asked if internal distribution of news articles was commonplace at many companies, SIIA's Bain disagreed. "Companies do not do this all the time," he said. "Some companies have compliance procedures in place to keep it from happening."
Compliance procedures include staff designated for licensing and compliance, sufficient budgets for the content licensing needs of the company, education programs for staff, deals with major content outlets, and strict policies and internal penalties for violating copyright, Bain said.
SIIA learned about the situation through a confidential tip, the trade group said. The person who reported Knowledge Networks will receive a $6,000 reward.
Now that I've distributed this article to my office peers, I suppose I'm now open to legal scrutiny. WTH?
Supposedly the antagonists in this story claim this is not a common thing for companies:
I suspect quite the opposite. Sure there are companies big enough and diligent enough with deep enough pockets to engage in OCD behaviors such as this one -- applying bizarre policy to bizarre and grey legal matters.
I can't help but wonder what these antagonists think... do they want as few people reading their material as possible?
And, talk about hostile controlling behaviors, also from the article:
So, to appease SIIA, send staff to their copyright course (wonder if it's free... probably not), and let SIIA issue public releases stating offender's public remorse for it's transgression.
Sometime I'd just love to find an employee of one of these types (SIIA, RIAA, you name it), and follow him around for a couple of days and issue a complaint the first time I see him reading even a snippet of an article over someone's shoulder on the bus or train, or tapping his foot to even a motif from some else's music player.
What a crock!
The previous company I worked for, which laid me off, routinely had "Dilbert" comic strip photocopies on people's doors. Can I turn them in and get six grand?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
My company circulates material like this on a regular basis. This is to totally bogus -- wait, six grand you say?
I made sure to copy all of my coworkers with this...
When will it stop?
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
The copyright industry will force everyone to keep quiet all the time. But the phones will still ring in movie theaters - they just won't be able to record the movie without getting caught.
The current overreaching copyright regime inhibits, rather than promotes, the progress of science and useful arts. It secures for unlimited times to parties other than authors, like publishers and agencies, exclusive rights. That inhibit, rather than promote the progress that justifies the Constitution's original compromise with our inalienable freedom to express ourselves, even by copying another's content.
At one time, for a few hundred years, economics meant copyright was the compromise between perfect freedom and perfect commerce. But now technology and global interconnectedness have reduced the time in which exclusivity is justifiable, even as corporations have extended the "limited times" to longer, indefinitely long, periods.
We have to scrap this thing and start over with new limited times, shorter than the original 17 years (a human generation) of the late 1700s. Or it will scrap us, as it has already done for far too long.
--
make install -not war
I can't help but wonder what these antagonists think... do they want as few people reading their material as possible?
They want money, what else? The proposed remedies are an extortion - pay $300,000 per year in "compliance staff" or $300,000 in fines or some kind of "reasonable licensing" fee. This case also has the stink of nailing a smaller player to score propaganda points and lay down favorable judgement before they go after bigger fish like Google.
The sickest thing about this is that the end result will be more restrictive than paper. People have shared newspapers, magazines and clippings from them. They did this even before copy machines made it easy to duplicate the material. Now that computers have made it costless to duplicate information and make sure everyone who needs it can have it, these turds come out and advocate technology that's about as restrictive as clay tablets. You have to wonder if sending lists of links with excerpts is next on their list of "piracy" and how any organization can tell anyone anything if they win.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This settlement is not about sharing a news story with a coworker. This is about a company building internal procedures around photocopying news articles, putting together a news packet, and distributing these packets around as form of employee education.
So, everybody who's yelling about getting in trouble for reading over a coworker's shoulder, or not being allowed to email links just needs to calm down and read the fine article.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
TFA doesn't have the specifics, but I am willing to guess that the problem was that the accused was copying the text of articles from site and redistributing that, not passing on the link to the story.
Why the important difference? Copying and redistributing would deny the news publisher of whatever ad revenue they would receive when the reader went directly to their site (and subsequently were served the ads). Something similar could be said about a newspaper/magazine clipping.
Something like this is, of course, all about money, so my speculation is that the causation is the loss of ad revenue.
Not an accountant either, but here's a rule of thumb: if it's an expense to one party it's income to the other.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, that was fine at a time in history when in order to put something in a tangible form required great effort - a printing press or whatever and a physical distribution network- but now - it's a matter of CTRL-C > CTRL-V > SEND/PUBLISH (etc).
The 'fixed and tangible form' is as near to the fluidity of verbal communication as makes next to no goddamn difference.
We write now, as we used to talk; we disseminate our communication as much electronically as physically (at the water cooler or whatever); we e-mail stories and clippings to that wider electronic social sphere - and it's no more difficult - in fact easier - than opening our meatholes and flapping our lips.
Our communications have changed; our means and modes of social interaction. Laws covering our communications have not kept pace (and have in fact retrogressed).
We do not need to abolish copyright to achive this, we need sane copyright reform that ACCEPTS and EMBRACES and works with our new means of mass-instant-digital-remix-sample-communication without seeking to penalise us for using it; that doesn't seek to punish us for using one of the greatest and most useful technolocial and social developments.
We need Sane Copyright Reform.
-Blue Stone.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
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.
Ave Molech Setting
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.
I just showed a co-worker a newspaper article from my local town...i'm in deep trouble now ;-)
Somtimes things just get out of hand. Where does it end?
Old and Busted: RIAA
New Hotness: SIAA
We're doomed.
Simple, send him/her a link to the source of the article. Co-worker sees the article, original content provider gets their ad money.