4 ms·
That's copyright for you. Its purpose has been totally inverted, and now, rather than functioning primarily as the artificial constraint on supply that allows p
by cookiecaper 9y ago
That's copyright for you. Its purpose has been totally inverted, and now, rather than functioning primarily as the artificial constraint on supply that allows people to market their intellectual goods, it's mostly used by big companies to quash competitive threats and silence dissenters (pretty much what you'd expect from an aggressive speech control like copyright).
Copyright is so ingrained into our assumptions and culture that we almost never think or talk about it, but it's the beating heart behind so much of what drives the biggest companies today.
Consider that massive logistical operations that deliver critical supplies to people across the country every day, like Exxon and Walmart, are rivaled by companies that just print out DVDs. At some point we need to look at this and ask ourselves why these people are allowed to use a strictly artificial, government-granted monopoly to capture returns so disjointed from the social utility they provide, and think about the bigger picture effects of awarding them that excess.
Copyright and the CFAA are a disastrous tag team for online entrepreneurship, and the mechanism by which Google, Facebook, et al enforce their effective monopolies. The CFAA makes it illegal to get content over a network without having permission first, and copyright makes it illegal to load those pages into RAM whether you're authorized to download them or not.
Of course, when Google et al were brought to task for their ignorance of these laws, after dozens if not hundreds of small sites doing very similar things had been mercilessly crushed by the legal system, the judges magically felt that Google's use was "fair" (see Perfect 10 v. Amazon).
IANAL but people grossly underestimate the draconian reach of copyright legislation. And that's not really an accident; media outlets don't want attention on this, because they know if people realized how bad these laws are, their gravy train wouldn't last much longer.
- Karrot_Kream 9y agoI wasn't aware of the combo of CFAA and copyright. Are there any blog posts describing amendments and court cases regarding CFAA/copyright that a layman can read into?
- cookiecaper 9y agoThe unexpected copyright component is known as the "RAM Copy Doctrine". If I recall correctly, MAI v. Peak [0] was the case that established that, and it has been referenced in web scraping cases many times since. RAM Copy Doctrine is the digital equivalent of stating that a new infringing copy of the work is created every time someone looks at something without a license from the rightsholder, since it creates a "fixed" copy in the retina. Effectively, this neuters Feist v. Rural Telephone [1] for online purposes, because you can't use a computer to "look at" the source material in order to reference it's non-copyrightable facts. The computer formatting that encapsulates unoriginal, Feist-style data almost automatically meets the standard of originality necessary to constitute a copyrightable work (e.g., document structure like XML tags or JSON layout), so under the RAM Copy Doctrine, just loading that small shell into RAM for any purpose, even if it's just to read out non-copyrightable facts, may well constitute infringement. This argument has worked against many scrapers. And of course, under the CFAA, speaking to their servers without explicit permission is of dubious legality, and continuing to speak to their servers after being told to stop is certainly illegal. In most cases, both of these arguments are brought and both arguments are considered persuasive. Eric Goldman's blog [2] usually does a decent job following cases that involve the CFAA and/or web scraping, IMO. Legal threats along this axis are apparently so frequent that Goldman set up a form letter telling people that he can't answer their legal questions. [3] I am not a lawyer. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Computer,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp.... [1] https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/property/property-law-keyed-to-singer/intellectual-property/feist-v-rural-telephone-service-co/ https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/property/property-law-ke... [2] http://blog.ericgoldman.org/ http://blog.ericgoldman.org/ [3] http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2014/02/why-i-no-longer-respond-to-unsolicited-inquiries-about-legal-matters.html http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2014/02/why-i-...