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Information on the changes to copyright law

For those who requested information on the copyright bill making its way 
through Congress:

The copyright legislation currently in Congress is S. 1284 and H. 2441.  
Both bills would implement the recommendations of the White Paper 
released last Sept. by the Information Infrastructure Task Force.  A 
summary of that report should still be available at:
http://www.uspto.gov/text/pto/nii/ipwg.htm

The proposed bill would make transmission of a reproduction a violation 
of the copyright owner's distribution right.  "To 'transmit' a 
reproduction is to distribute it by any device or process whereby a copy 
of the work is fixed beyond the place from which it is sent."

This is all well and good except that courts would likely interpret the 
language in terms of the White Paper.  The White Paper endorsed recent 
court rulings that a document in RAM is "fixed" even if it is not saved 
or printed.  The White Paper states "Electronic network transmissions 
from one computer to another, such as e-mail, may only reside on each 
computer in RAM, but that has been found to be sufficient fixation." 
(Page 28, citing Advanced Computer Services of Michigan v. MAI Systems 
Corp. 845 F.SUpp. 356 (E.D. Va. 1994).)

The cited case, and two other cases (including one affirmed by the 9th 
circuit Court of Appeals) all involved computer programs loaded into 
RAM.  In these cases, a computer manufacturer sold computers with 
proprietary operating systems to businesses.  The license agreement said 
the clients could not allow others to use the software.  When a repair 
company booted up the computer to look at the error messages, they "made 
a copy" since the software was loaded into RAM.  In all three cases, the 
repair company was found guilty of copyright infringement.

Now, obviously, this is a different situation than browsing the Web.  But 
the White Paper suggests even an e-mail message that is erased is 
copyright infringement.  Of course, most companies with Web pages want 
you to look at their stuff, so they aren't going to sue you.  The paper I 
just wrote argues that browsing the Web, and even linking to other 
documents, is not copyright infringement.  I argue that putting a 
document on the Web is like putting an outgoing message on your answering 
machine.  Anyone is free to call the number and listen to the message.  
So even if a document in RAM is a copy, the copyright owner is the one 
who made and sent the copy to my Web browser.

Perhaps of more interest to the members of this list, the proposed bill 
would also make it illegal to manufacture or import any technology that 
can remove a "watermark" from an electronic document.  And make it 
illegal to knowingly transmit a document with an altered or missing 
watermark.  This raises issues about fair use as well as major privacy 
issues.

For a better summary of these issues and a discussion of some of the 
global issues, see Pamela Samuelson's article, "Intellectual property 
rights and the global information economy," in the January 1996 issue of 
Communmications of the ACM.

On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Brian W. Spolarich wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, matt jackson wrote:
> 
> > But you might be interested to know that recent court decisions have 
> > stated that placing something in RAM is making a copy.  And a bill is 
> > just coming out of committee in Congress that would strengthen copyright 
> > law to the point where simply browsing through the Web reading documents 
> > (without saving or printing them) could be considered copyright infringement.
> 
>   Um...if one puts a document so that an HTTP (or other) server can read 
> it, and I read it, either by finding it with a search engine or other 
> means, how can that be considered copyright infringement?
> 
>   If they copyright owner didn't want the document to be read, then they 
> shouldn't put the document in a publicly-accessible place.  If they want 
> to impose access restrictions/charges/etc. that's their business, and its 
> my obligation to respect those restrictions.  I think your post is 
> missing (hopefully) some crucial factual detail.
> 
>   Do you have a reference on this piece of legislation?
> 
>   -brian
> 
> --
> Brian W. Spolarich - ANS CO+RE Systems - briansp@ans.net - (313)677-7311
>               Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
> 
>
References: