6 ms·

Nearly every one of your Medium posts could be interpreted as a copyright violation. Copy pasting text and calling it a "curation" doesn't give you the right to

Nearly every one of your Medium posts could be interpreted as a copyright violation. Copy pasting text and calling it a "curation" doesn't give you the right to publish others' works without their permission.

wunderlust 9y ago
With proper citation, there's no violation, right?
- lmkg 9y ago
  Proper citation means that you're not violating academic integrity. That has very little to do with copyright.
- jjawssd 9y ago
  If I put a watermark in a movie which properly cites the original does that allow me to redistribute the derivative work? Same applies here.
  - msla 9y ago
    A lot of people seem to think it does: http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ > How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. [snip] > On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID. The point is, people understand plagiarism, and they universally think it to be wrong. People want copyright law to enforce that social norm, not understanding that plagiarism isn't something the law cares about; copyright law is somewhat related, but it is mostly orthogonal to it, and there's no other law which even defines the concept. Therefore, people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. After all, real lawyers use forms of words to do things, so why shouldn't my magic be similarly efficacious?
    - mncharity 9y ago
      > people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. Yeah, silly people. Remember email in the early 1990's? It was clear that copying email messages from disk to memory, and memory to frame buffer, constituted copyright "copies". And that no implicit grant of permission existed. So after Berne, unless there was an explicit grant in an email, copying it from disk to screen was a copyright violation. Various organizations attached footers to outgoing emails stating the terms under which they could be used, but most didn't. And yet silly, silly people - they just ignored the legalities and continued reading their emails each morning. It's like they thought they could just do something reasonable, establish a societal norm, and copyright law would eventually adapt to it. Silly people. Oh, and forwarding, without distribution right! And display, without performance right. And more recently, Pinterest! So, people have been confused for decades. So many people just don't understand how the law works, and how it evolves.
      - msla 9y ago
        Your attempt at sarcasm aside, you don't change the law with badly-written nonsensical disclaimers.
        mncharity 9y ago
        Not my field, but consider law as a codification of custom. If a community practices "nonsensical disclaimers", adapts that practice to stakeholder concerns, establishes that practice as socially viable and worthwhile, and proliferates it as custom, then I suggest that yes, the law may well change. Even in the short term, "nonsensical disclaimers" might impact 5-factor fair use decisions. And consider the scientific community. Massive ignorance of, and disregard for, the letter of copyright law. There is instead a different social norm, built on acknowledgement. Are those "nonsensical disclaimers"? Even when creation of law is corrupt, and especially when enforcement of law is corrupt, societal norms do matter. Perhaps one might usefully examine the youtube copying and "nonsensical disclaimers" as a semi-aware form of civil disobedience?
- cyphar 9y ago
  Acadmic citation guidelines have little to do with copyright (for example, my university requires me to cite public domain works -- despite there being no copyright on said works). Most citations or reasonable quotations fall under fair use, but reproducing an entire work (and/or modifying it) fall under copyright infringement.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  No. One of the tenets of the "fair use" standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substantiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substan...) is that the more of a work you reproduce within your own, the less likely it is that your reproduction is actually fair use. This is true whether or not you cite the author of the work you're reproducing. The idea is to give people who just want to quote a line or two leeway to do so, while punishing those who would take someone else's work en masse and publish it under their own name.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    "Fair use" is a very US-American concept. For example German Urheberrechtsgesetz > https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ knows no concept of fair use - you can easily get sued if you use even a little snippet of a copyrighted work (and often are). Only in some very specifically defined cases short quotes are allowed: > https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html
    - nayuki 9y ago
      "Fair dealing" is the Canadian equivalent of "fair use", following much of the same principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_Canadian_copyright_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_Canadian_copyr...
deleted 9y ago
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js7745 9y ago
You may be right here, going forwards I am going to provide more commentary on my posts. But if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone by posting 75% of Paul Graham's essay on medium. It's definitely providing value to all of the people on Medium who wouldn't come across it normally, and Paul Graham isn't losing any valuable traffic or sales from this. So really what's the harm? Just because precedents have been set in cases involving much more monetary risk doesn't mean that what I'm doing is harming anyone. In my opinion, it's helping.
- toss1 9y ago
  That's exactly the same BS argument as "just give me your product for free and you'll get tons of publicity". Only works if the person proposing it is actually world-famous. Otherwise, it's just scamming. (Not even addressing the copyright infringement issues here.) You are freeloading on PG's insight and fame, trying to increase yours at his expense. Even if the expense is relatively trivial, it's no less true. If it were actually OK, you would have already asked PG if it was ok for you to hack up his articles and re-publish them under your name. Come to think of it, why don't you ask him directly, and see if he thinks it's ok, or what conditions he'd put on it? Let us know how that conversation goes.
- hashkb 9y ago
  It's not about your opinion. Of course you think what you're doing is ok, everyone does. Fortunately we have a general consensus (and laws) that say what you did was wrong. Own it.
- singhrac 9y ago
  To address your point ("So what's really the harm here"), there's a lot of reasons copyright law exists, including: 1. By using his work without permission, you risk misrepresenting his message. For example, you might accidentally remove a key passage or quote or citation. After all, you say "Below are (in our opinion) the essential excerpts" - I have a feeling he wouldn't agree. 2. He almost certainly prefers to have his work consolidated in a single place (he has a distinctive style), for any number of reasons (branding, analytics, ability to remove and/or edit, etc.) 3. At the end of the day, it's his property. I think it's easy to think "these laws don't really make sense here, because of [foo] reason", but it's nonsensical to do so without asking for pg's permission. You risk looking like you knew that he wouldn't be ok with it. If you really intended to help him, just ask.

wunderlust 9y ago

With proper citation, there's no violation, right?

lmkg 9y ago
Proper citation means that you're not violating academic integrity. That has very little to do with copyright.
jjawssd 9y ago
If I put a watermark in a movie which properly cites the original does that allow me to redistribute the derivative work? Same applies here.
- msla 9y ago
  A lot of people seem to think it does: http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ > How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. [snip] > On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID. The point is, people understand plagiarism, and they universally think it to be wrong. People want copyright law to enforce that social norm, not understanding that plagiarism isn't something the law cares about; copyright law is somewhat related, but it is mostly orthogonal to it, and there's no other law which even defines the concept. Therefore, people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. After all, real lawyers use forms of words to do things, so why shouldn't my magic be similarly efficacious?
  - mncharity 9y ago
    > people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. Yeah, silly people. Remember email in the early 1990's? It was clear that copying email messages from disk to memory, and memory to frame buffer, constituted copyright "copies". And that no implicit grant of permission existed. So after Berne, unless there was an explicit grant in an email, copying it from disk to screen was a copyright violation. Various organizations attached footers to outgoing emails stating the terms under which they could be used, but most didn't. And yet silly, silly people - they just ignored the legalities and continued reading their emails each morning. It's like they thought they could just do something reasonable, establish a societal norm, and copyright law would eventually adapt to it. Silly people. Oh, and forwarding, without distribution right! And display, without performance right. And more recently, Pinterest! So, people have been confused for decades. So many people just don't understand how the law works, and how it evolves.
    - msla 9y ago
      Your attempt at sarcasm aside, you don't change the law with badly-written nonsensical disclaimers.
      - mncharity 9y ago
        Not my field, but consider law as a codification of custom. If a community practices "nonsensical disclaimers", adapts that practice to stakeholder concerns, establishes that practice as socially viable and worthwhile, and proliferates it as custom, then I suggest that yes, the law may well change. Even in the short term, "nonsensical disclaimers" might impact 5-factor fair use decisions. And consider the scientific community. Massive ignorance of, and disregard for, the letter of copyright law. There is instead a different social norm, built on acknowledgement. Are those "nonsensical disclaimers"? Even when creation of law is corrupt, and especially when enforcement of law is corrupt, societal norms do matter. Perhaps one might usefully examine the youtube copying and "nonsensical disclaimers" as a semi-aware form of civil disobedience?
cyphar 9y ago
Acadmic citation guidelines have little to do with copyright (for example, my university requires me to cite public domain works -- despite there being no copyright on said works). Most citations or reasonable quotations fall under fair use, but reproducing an entire work (and/or modifying it) fall under copyright infringement.
smacktoward 9y ago
No. One of the tenets of the "fair use" standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substantiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substan...) is that the more of a work you reproduce within your own, the less likely it is that your reproduction is actually fair use. This is true whether or not you cite the author of the work you're reproducing. The idea is to give people who just want to quote a line or two leeway to do so, while punishing those who would take someone else's work en masse and publish it under their own name.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  "Fair use" is a very US-American concept. For example German Urheberrechtsgesetz > https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ knows no concept of fair use - you can easily get sued if you use even a little snippet of a copyrighted work (and often are). Only in some very specifically defined cases short quotes are allowed: > https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html
  - nayuki 9y ago
    "Fair dealing" is the Canadian equivalent of "fair use", following much of the same principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_Canadian_copyright_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_Canadian_copyr...

deleted 9y ago

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deleted 9y ago

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js7745 9y ago

You may be right here, going forwards I am going to provide more commentary on my posts. But if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone by posting 75% of Paul Graham's essay on medium. It's definitely providing value to all of the people on Medium who wouldn't come across it normally, and Paul Graham isn't losing any valuable traffic or sales from this. So really what's the harm? Just because precedents have been set in cases involving much more monetary risk doesn't mean that what I'm doing is harming anyone. In my opinion, it's helping.

toss1 9y ago
That's exactly the same BS argument as "just give me your product for free and you'll get tons of publicity". Only works if the person proposing it is actually world-famous. Otherwise, it's just scamming. (Not even addressing the copyright infringement issues here.) You are freeloading on PG's insight and fame, trying to increase yours at his expense. Even if the expense is relatively trivial, it's no less true. If it were actually OK, you would have already asked PG if it was ok for you to hack up his articles and re-publish them under your name. Come to think of it, why don't you ask him directly, and see if he thinks it's ok, or what conditions he'd put on it? Let us know how that conversation goes.
hashkb 9y ago
It's not about your opinion. Of course you think what you're doing is ok, everyone does. Fortunately we have a general consensus (and laws) that say what you did was wrong. Own it.
singhrac 9y ago
To address your point ("So what's really the harm here"), there's a lot of reasons copyright law exists, including: 1. By using his work without permission, you risk misrepresenting his message. For example, you might accidentally remove a key passage or quote or citation. After all, you say "Below are (in our opinion) the essential excerpts" - I have a feeling he wouldn't agree. 2. He almost certainly prefers to have his work consolidated in a single place (he has a distinctive style), for any number of reasons (branding, analytics, ability to remove and/or edit, etc.) 3. At the end of the day, it's his property. I think it's easy to think "these laws don't really make sense here, because of [foo] reason", but it's nonsensical to do so without asking for pg's permission. You risk looking like you knew that he wouldn't be ok with it. If you really intended to help him, just ask.