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Originally Posted by RWood
If he fails to enforce his rights he is subject to having those rights stripped from him. If I posted the works (even for free) and he becomes aware of it and fails to exercise his rights the works may fall into the public domain. It is a civil matter which means that the Government will not take any action on its own, but only as Steve goes to court to get them to exercise a judgment against his works being posted elsewhere.
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Actually, David M (and Conde Nast) may argue that that isn't necessarily the case. Even if I did not enforce my claim, I don't think the works would simply fall into public domain. They would still be mine, and if I decided the day before they officially fall into public domain to sue, I could conceivably be awarded damages for every violation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
In that case you seem to have good reasons to suspect or believe that it is not OK to distribute it and you should stop. But that does not makes what you did before illegal. There seems to be a lot of bogus claims of having copyright floating around or other kind of claims that what you have on an web page is not allowed. So it is not resonable that you have to believe every claim without some other evidence to support the claim.
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In the U.S., it would be the duty of the distributor to stop distributing the moment they were told it was not okay, whether they had proof or not. Because, if proof was produced afterward, the distributor would be held fully liable for breaking the law after he was notified.
In the informal situation, the "burden of proof" would be placed on the distributor to establish the validity of the owner's claim. They could always ask the owner for proof, but the owner is under no compulsion to comply with the request... he can simply say "go look it up," and that's all. (Usually, they provide the proof, so there is no question.)
Interestingly enough, in the formal situation of court, the "burden of proof" would be on the copyright owner to produce the documents before the judge. If they did not produce the documents, the judge would likely let the distributor off.
Fun system, huh?