favor

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Sandy
> Rutherford
> Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2005 3:55 PM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: favor
>
>
> >>>>> On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 11:43:32 +0100,
> >>>>> Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony at wanadoo.fr> said:
>
>  MH> But that's different in that it was never released to a
> public forum
>  MH> in the first place (explicitly or otherwise).
>
>  > I'm not sure what you mean by "public forum."  A server
> accessible from
>  > the Internet without any special authorization mechanism is about as
>  > public as anything can get, particularly if there is something else
>  > linking to it that allows spiders to find it.
>
> This is not so clear.  In a March 2004 decision regarding P-to-P music
> sharing, Justice von Finckenstein of the Federal Court of Canada ruled
> that:
>
>    The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer
>    where that copy can be accessed via a P2P service does not amount to
>    distribution. Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a
>    positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as
> sending out
>    the copies or advertising that they are available for copying.
>
> A parallel here would be that placing copyright material on a public
> website would not amount to distribution and therefore, not be a
> copyright infringement.  Of course, it could be argued that if Google
> started linking to it, that would constitute advertisement.  However,
> it is hard to see that as the prerequisite "positive act" on the part
> of the web site owner.  It is more a positive act on Google's part.
> In his ruling, Finckenstein pointed out that there is a parallel with
> public libraries.  A public library does not infringe on copyright,
> simply by having books available for loan.
>

There was an interesting case a number of years ago by some guy who
had put up a website with a bunch of Multics stuff on it (I believe,
it might have been VMS not Multics)

The guy handed out the URL to some people he knew all of whom
passed around the URL and all of whom agreed was a most useful
site.  The URL was passed to a number of additional people and
posted on some other websites and pretty soon the guy was angrily
e-mailing people telling them to stop linking to his site.  You
can imagine what the reactions by the sites were (your domain name
and site are public and I'll link to it if I want)  He eventually
took it down.

Ted