Re: Re: 'Free Culture' Advocate May Pay High Price

On 26/07/2011 22:17, Lee Passey wrote:
> On Tue, July 26, 2011 5:26 am, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
<snip>
> My suspicion is that if any convictions come of these charges they will be
> based on trespass, unauthorized access to network wiring, and possible
> unintentional damages arising from these actions, and not a result of merely
> collecting that which can be otherwise freely downloaded, even if eventually
> made available through other means.
>
> Believers in "intellectual property" (of which I am not one) are quick to jump
> on this case as a demonstration of the fruits of unauthorized copying, but I
> think that that is just an invented boogeyman here.
>
> Attention to detail is important.
Lee,

You make an excellent point. You miss, however, that the issue remains 
one of IP protections - without which the databases might well not have 
been built up, and the issues you identify would, consequently, not be 
involved. I think you miss a second point. The material that is in the 
public domain is the content only.

Take up Daniel's specific: early newspaper files. You are free to go to 
any library that has those files and make copies yourself. What is free 
to download is available either because of generosity - as with 
Gutenberg for example - or because of investment in creating a database 
to access. In either case there is cost, actually quite considerable, in 
time or money or both.

Just because copyright law itself may not be used or needed, does not 
diminish its potential impact. This could establish that infringers 
could be facing prosecutions on contingent and possibly more serious 
charges. If these materials in the JSTOR databases can be 'otherwise 
freely downloaded', then the raiding of those databases is pointless. 
Are you sure that download availability does exist for all the files 
collected there?

Joseph



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