Wishful thinking. From this side of the fence, your comments are
completely at odds with our experience and policy. I can't speak for
Barb or the Uni. of Toronto, but I can speak as someone who
hosts/provides Internet services.
Imagine there's a copyright violation. BigCo isn't happy about it and
wants it stopped. The following people have it in their power to stop
it:
- the poster (individual, may not agree, hard to locate, probably not
enough assets to make it worth while)
- the host of the machine (a company, easily found, lots of nice fixed
assets)
- the ISP (ditto)
So who's BigCo going to have a little chat to? Sure, they may email
the poster. But they are also going to hit the host of the machine,
and the ISP, because they can find them easily. And both those
companies will take whatever action they can - quickly and easily -
to remove the source of copyright infringement. No one customer is
worth that amount of legal hassle, *even if the customer is right* -
the legal bills would be more than the entire lifetime value of that
customer.
Our general instinct is to remove sites/lists/accounts/posts that
become subject to legal issues. We can't really afford to do
anything else.
Also, copyrights are not just there to protect revenue - they are
there to allow the content owner to control their content. So it
doesn't matter if a company would let you read that content on their
site for free, or that you aren't making money on that content -
you're still infringing.
The only saving grace in this whole mess is that companies are
generally happy to tolerate a moderate amount of what is technically
infringement because its good advertising and brings traffic to their
site - and enforcement would be impractical. Different companies have
different policies. The reason we're comfortable to continue without
demanding proof that everything is legally OK is that most content
owners would send a cease and desist which we would immediately
comply with.
BTW - this is one of the reasons why I strongly encourage people
writing Parkinson's related material to explicitly release it under
the Open Content license (http://www.opencontent.org/) which
specifically allows for re-distribution and reuse. Most people
writing stuff about Parkinson's take the view that "we're all in it
together" and are happy to have their stuff spread as far and wide as
they can, so its good to be clear about it.
Simon
>in re email lists
>i doubt that a list-owner and/or a list-server-provider
>would or could ever be held responsible for postings therein
>else
>l-soft intl and virtually every major university in the world
>would not provide the millions of e-mail lists which exist
>
>copyrights exist to protect against potential lost revenue
>from unauthorized commercial i.e. for-profit use
>
>the university of toronto, barbara paterson, and we
>are not paying or receiving monies here
>
>therefore imho mention of idemnity is irrelevant
--
--------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ----------
Simon J. Coles Email: [log in to unmask]
New Information Paradigms Work Phone: +44 1344 753703
http://www.nipltd.com/ Work Fax: +44 1344 753742
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