Quote:
Originally Posted by pruss
I am not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that in the U.S. you can still be liable for civil damages for unintentional copyright infringement. That strikes me as really problematic. For instance, it seems to mean that if I post several poems in my blog from the same author without copyright permission and beyond fair-use, and you innocently go to my blog not knowing that I've done this bad thing, you may be liable for copyright infringement, just because you downloaded the page to your computer's memory. Or am I missing something? |
That's not an unreasonable question, but I think your blog visitor is in the clear.
But "Hold!" you cry, "she has copied everything I copied. She gets away with it and I don't? What if it was the entire book of poems, for sale at my local poem store, which I checked out from the library, copied & posted on my blog? You mean she can copy the whole book, and nothing happens to her, while I have to cough up penalties for copyright infringment?"
My answer to that is a firm and unyielding "probably." (Because if the answer were "certainly" we would have little need for lawyers. Speaking as a lawyer, my advice is that you need a lawyer.)
Suppose your reader eliminates the middleblogger, goes directly to the library, and copies out the entire book while innocently pretending to merely be taking notes. She now owns a complete copy of the book, which she takes home, types into her computer, and makes into her screensaver. So long as she doesn't send a copy off to her friends, or try to sell the screensaver, she is not going to be liable for copyright infringement.
About the worst that could happen to your blog reader (even if she copied the whole book) is that if she were to be hunted down & hauled into court, she could be required to erase the poems from her computer and either erase or destroy her handwritten copy.
In other words, as I read the law, merely copying something, even in its entirety, does not amount to "infringement," but
can result in an unauthorized copy which no one actually owns. The copyright owner doesn't own it, not even the handwritten copy - that's the property of your blog reader. But at the same time, the blog reader doesn't own it, although she owns the physical medium in the form of the computer or the handwritten copy. But the computer file or handwriting has no right to exist - the author didn't give permission -so the court can order it erased.
Now, I am not a copyright lawyer, and someone who knows better than I could put me straight. But the way I read copyright law, it is not intended to punish individuals who make a single copy for their own use. It is intended to penalize people who make money - or get some kind of other reward, like attracting blog readers - by taking someone else's creation and publishing it without permission.