Hi Roy,

"Roy Lewallen" wrote in message
...
I suggest keeping more like $20,000. The last time I checked with my lawyer,
that was the maximum penalty for willful copyright infringement, in addition
to any monetary damages which could be proved. All that's necessary to get
the $20k, I was told, is to prove that the infringement was willful, not
that any financial damage occurred.

This might be better posted at college libraries in the copy rooms where
students routinely Xerox entire books ostensibly because they can't afford the
real thing (which I suspect is rarely true, and it's usually more a case of
wanting to spend the money on an Xbox rather than a book)... rather than at
some ham who's scanning old magazines as a form of public service when the
originals are difficult to obtain for an audience that generally would pay for
them if they were.

People seem to have less and less compunction against stealing intellectual
property, I suppose because it keeps getting easier to do.

I agree with you in general, although I think that scanning old magazines and
books falls into a gray area where one is -- in all likelihood -- breaking the
letter of the law but generally not its spirit. I accept rationalizations
along those lines, just as I can't really fault someone who decided so travel
100Mph through some utterly uninhabited random road in Eastern Oregon. :-)
Still, anyone who is hauled into court can't really complain, but personally
I'd hope that some lawyer hoping to make an example would choose someone
posting to alt.binaries.e-book.technical (where 99% of the posts are clear
violations of the letter and spirit of copyright law) rather than the OP.

Rationalizations are as diverse and original as fertile minds can create.
The ultimate result will be that eventually, nobody will bother creating
anything original.

Only in some sort of idealist world. In the real world, original creations
will be generated so long as doing so puts bread on the table. Would you
rather sell 1,000 copies of a 99% copy-proof program at $10,000 each or
1,000,000 copies of a pretty-readily-copyable program at $100 each? Bill
Gates clearly prefers the later.

As you're probably aware, Don Lancaster makes a good point that the
oft-heralded intellectual property protection device of the patent really
doesn't do you much good in the real world, at least until you're a very large
company. Tektronix seemed to be using this approach decades back when the
comprehensive use of T-coils to obtain wider frequency respones was a
well-protected inside secret, no?

Incidentally, I was told by the ARRL that authors of articles in all their
publications are given blanket permission to put a copy of articles they've
written on their own web site, with appropriate acknowledgment that the ARRL
owns the copyright and reproduction is by permission. That's generous of
them.

I suppose it is, but these days you can't make any decent money writing for
the ARRL or the magazines, and as such publications have to be pretty generous
in what they offer because they're effectively asking for significant
donations of intellectual property by their authors.

---Joel Kolstad