4 ms·

I think it's quite ridiculous. If I buy a map, can I use it to be a guide, giving people directions and make a living? If I buy a story book, can I use it to

by echaozh 17y ago

I think it's quite ridiculous. If I buy a map, can I use it to be a guide, giving people directions and make a living? If I buy a story book, can I use it to read to children and collect money from their parents? Or, if I spend some time to index all the books in the library, can I sell the index and make money? Or did I violate the rights of either the library or the books' copyright owners? I think crawling and making use of the crawled data is not offending the copyright law because it's not actually a copy of the data. Rather, it's a service to transform the data and help other people get to the original data in an easier way. Technically, they can crawl the data on the spot when receiving a request from their clients. In order to speed up the process, they somehow cache the data crawled from earlier occasions. But that's technical details, which is encapsulated. Otherwise, they could have stored URLs and offsets in the pages, rather than the data itself. I don't think that breaks the law, or there will be no way to avoid breaking the law to refer to anything.

DrJokepu 17y ago
A couple of examples: if you rent a DVD from one of those DVD rental places, normally you can't play it in public places like bars and places like that. If you buy a CD you can't broadcast it on your radio station, you need a special licence for that. Another possible related issue is the question of derivative works (e.g. the index of a library). There's a Wikipedia article about derivative works, it's a bit too complex to summarize here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
- blasdel 17y ago
  Two extraordinarily poor examples! Both films and music (plus songwriting too) have been explicitly enshrined by US copyright law as having separate rights for home use and public performance. Each has multiple spheres of statutory licensing organizations with special exemptions from anti-trust law.
  - DrJokepu 17y ago
    I was referring to the copyright laws of the United Kingdom which is the country where I live (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988). Here, public performance infringement is not limited to solely films and music (Section 16.1c). I'm not very familiar with US copyright legislation but I assumed that the copyright laws there are similar without checking any sources - which was a mistake apparently.

by echaozh 17y ago

DrJokepu 17y ago

A couple of examples: if you rent a DVD from one of those DVD rental places, normally you can't play it in public places like bars and places like that. If you buy a CD you can't broadcast it on your radio station, you need a special licence for that. Another possible related issue is the question of derivative works (e.g. the index of a library). There's a Wikipedia article about derivative works, it's a bit too complex to summarize here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

blasdel 17y ago
Two extraordinarily poor examples! Both films and music (plus songwriting too) have been explicitly enshrined by US copyright law as having separate rights for home use and public performance. Each has multiple spheres of statutory licensing organizations with special exemptions from anti-trust law.
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  I was referring to the copyright laws of the United Kingdom which is the country where I live (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988). Here, public performance infringement is not limited to solely films and music (Section 16.1c). I'm not very familiar with US copyright legislation but I assumed that the copyright laws there are similar without checking any sources - which was a mistake apparently.