Re: [Bug-gne]Copyright infringements

[Bob Dodd]

--- Tom Chance <address@hidden> wrote:
> From that article, one circumstance in which the
> creator and/or owner of the mechanism by which
> "illegal" material is distributed, can by taken to
> court, is thus:
> 
> "The accused contributory infringer knew of the
> underlying direct infringement. This element can be
> satisfied by showing either that the contributory
> infringer actually knew about the infringing activity,
> or that he reasonably should have known given all the
> facts and circumstances. At a minimum, however, the
> contributory infringer must have some specific
> information about infringing activity—the mere fact
> that the system is capable of being used for
> infringement, by itself, is not enough."

It's the "reasonably should have known" bit that really causes the
problems. Later on, talking about the cour findings it says,

"Napster should have known of the infringing activity, based on the
recording industry experience and downloading habits of its executives
and the appearance of well-known song titles in certain promotional
screen shots used by Napster".

So choosing not to look is not a defence... 

If we referenced (let alone held a copy of) an entry on Picasso which
had several PNGs attached to it, and it was later discovered that the
PNGs were scans of copyrighted photo's of Picasso's works, we could be
hit for contributory infringement as we would have failed all 3 tests:
a) direct infringement (some oik posted copyrighted material), b)
material contribution (we provided the service), c) knowledge (it's
common knowledge that artists' pictures are copyrighted material, and
lots of PNGs attached to an article about such a famous artist should
make us suspicious).

As the guy says, we have a choice between engineered anarchy, and
control freakery :-(  Imran's solution from a week or so ago would take
us down the "anarchy" route, but even that leaves us open to
Napster-style legal attack. If we were to follow it though, we would
have to lose the central repository/index somehow =:-O Assuming that
was possible, would we still have what GNE was originally intended to
be, or would we simply have unleashed a loose conspiracy of
"informationistas" upon a spider-linked, formatted subset of the web?

Problem is, the control-freakery side doesn't get us where we want to
be either. To keep us legal would require strong editorial control and
aggressive censorship (exacltly what we were trying to avoid). Even
assuming we could agree on the editorial rules and who is in charge of
executing them, people are human and make mistakes.

Between the two extremes we seem to be stuck with, I guess it has to be
the anarchy route :-?

So, what we want is an encyclopedia/repository whose content we don't
control, whose classification into subject matter we can't control, and
whose posters are effectively anonymous. Oh yes, and any form of
communication between client and server must be connectionless,
otherwise we could "control" i.e. monitor/disconnect the connection.

Easy ;-)))

Proud to be an Informationista...
/bob


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