Everyday Copyright Violations

Schneier has pointed out a great law review article about the problems with copyright. The author takes a look at normal daily practices and how many commonplace actions actually result in what can be considered copyright violations. "By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John's activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing."

Comments

This is by design, not by accident.

[Tackhead]

> At worst, he faces imminent "destruction."

He has no time to survive! Make his time! (Move Zune! For great injustice!)

Sorry. I had to.

Since we've all seen and we all know Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." quote, and Rand's "There's no way to rule innocent man..." quote, let's go for something a little closer to home in US jurisprudence.

"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."

-Former Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice, Robert H. Jackson, April 1, 1940

Unfortunately, it wasn't an April Fool's joke.

Re:And Fonts...

[gEvil (beta)]

Does anyone even understand copyright on fonts?

I believe I have a semi-reasonable grasp of it, but welcome anyone to correct any errors I might make. The outlines of the characters in a font are not themselves copyrighted (nor can they be). However, the digital representation of these characters is copyrighted (i.e., the font files you buy or that come with software). This also includes derivatives based upon modifying the original digital files. However, if you were to print out the characters in a font, then redraw them in FontLab or Fontographer, you could claim the copyright to your new creation. However, you will then be scorned by the typographic community for doing so unless you at least make a few modifications to some of the characters. It's somewhat similar to software in that a disassembly and reimplementation of it must take place.