NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> AOL & Copyright Violation
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> AOL & Copyright Violation
Greg Bulmash (greg_at_bulmash.com)
Wed, 3 Dec 1997 23:41:35 -0800
On 3 Dec 97 at 18:02, online-ads_at_o-a.com told a little bird who told
me:
> From: "Steven Heath" <Steven_Heath_at_grey.net>
[snip]
> Hey, why just pick on AOL, lets sue any company or ISP that is running
> a proxy server. These things only have one role. To deprive you, the
> poor little old website with ad dollars.
[snip]
> You should not fight caching,
> caching is so net friendly I would rather not think about a Internet
> without it...
[snip]
I wasn't talking about suing, I was asking for thoughts on whether or
not this actually is a copyright violation. But since you
sarcastically brought it up, why the heck not?
You talk about caching being net-friendly. Yeah, well letting large
school districts take preferred textbooks to printers and run off
copies at a fraction of the cost of buying them from publishers would
be education-friendly. It would give them more money to spend on other
things, allow them to update textbooks more often... the benefits would
be enormous. Only problem is that it wouldn't be RIGHT. It would be
CRIMINAL.
Given, caching is a good thing for net speed, but as I said, that's
beside the point. What's good for the net has nothing to do with
current copyright law. I also explicitly said that ad caching was
beside the point as I was discussing CONTENT caching and some people do
use traffic stats for OTHER PURPOSES than just selling banners.
Whether content caching is good for the net is a non-issue. The
question here is whether it is good for content creators who want to
control the distribution of their work as far as the law provides.
And if AOL set up a web site to report cachine stats for all the places
their users visit, what about all the other ISP's. Will content
creators have to go to 80 or 100 different sites, or worse, will they
have to pay a service to collect and compile all the stats for them
even when they're spending way too much as it is on programs to
interpret their server logs, auditing services, etc?
Apparently you're a consumer, not a creator, so you think in terms of
what's good for the consumer. But think about this... copyright law is
intended to encourage creation. The control of their work that
copyright law gives them is the only thing that makes it truly
possible for creators to profit from their work. You can't make a
picture or a book or a piece of music a trade secret. And if anyone
can take it from you and redstribute it for their own commercial
purposes, they can steal your sales and even undercut your prices. If
that's so, why create at all if you're just going to have to watch your
work get stolen?
The problems with controlling the distribution of copyrighted material
online has made many people loathe to put some great content on the
net, and despite the technical advantages, caching seems to me a
possible way to undermine the marketing efforts of those who put
content online. If it does constitute unauthorized distribution, then
what are the broad-based implications for creative people who try to
market their work online?
-Greg Bulmash
http://www.bulmash.com
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