On Mon, 16 May 2005 08:08:26 -0000,
(Robert Bonomi) wrote:

In article ,
Phil Nelson wrote:
Hate to be a wet blanket, but how do you know that half of the stuff on BAMA
is not pirated and should never have been posted there in the first place?

Not all old schematics & manuals are in the public domain. For instance,
SAMS Technical Publishing, http://www.samswebsite.com/photofacts.html , is
still alive and well, and they have an understandable interest in keeping
people from distributing free, unauthorized copies of their Photofacts to
the world.

Just because you buy a copy of something, scan it, and upload to the
Internet, doesn't mean that it is "yours" to give away to the world.

If I scan the latest Tom Clancy novel and post his book on the Internet, I
am violating his copyright, pure and simple.

The only exceptions would be if :

[A] I have Tom Clancy's permission to distribute free copies of his latest
novel on the Internet,

or,

[b] I can prove in a court of law that Tom's copyright has expired or been
abandoned for some reason.

Not quite right. Unlike trademark, copyrights _cannot_ be 'abandoned'. A
copyright owner can have failed to go after any infringer for 50 years, and
then decides to go after _you_. "But everybody else is doing it, without
being sued" is NOT a defense.

In the U.S. (although _not_ in many other countries), it is possible for a
copyright holder to 'disclaim' their copyright rights, via an express statement
that they are placing the work "in the public domain". That disclaimer, once
made, cannot be withdrawn. Nor can the author prosecute for copyright
infringement any action that occurs after the disclaimer.


If I don't have [A] or [b] on my side, then Tom kicks my butt and closes me
down.

Almost correct. Qualify it with "if he so chooses", and it is exactly
correct. Given the probable dollar value losses due to the unauthorized
copying, "if he so chooses" is a VIRTUAL CERTAINTY. And I'm picking a nit
that "effectively" makes no difference. grin


I'll just add the following caveats:
1) "Anonymous" works -- with no author named, *are* protected by copyright.
2) An inability to identify the current holder of the copyright does *NOT*
mean that one is free to copy that material. To avoid potential problems
one _must_ have the permission of the copyright holder(s).
3) When a company goes "out of business", *somebody* gets ownership of
the property that that company owned. That which is not sold is
distributed among the remaining owners of the company. In the case
of a corporation, this is anyone who still held shares at the time of
the dissolution. This gets *real* messy for intellectual property,
see item 2 above.
4) to be 'safe', if you don't have copyright owner permission, you better
be able to *prove* that copyright has expired, or has been disclaimed.



Yep -- it's an interesting problem. I recently read an article
about all the good computer code buried, and no longer available, from
outfits like Lernout and Hauspie, which produced the best available
voice recognition products. When the outfit went under, someone
acquired the rights to all that code. Apparently they didn't know the
actual value of it, so they chose not to let anyone have it for fear
of being undercompensated for it.