[Taxacom] copyright infringement by "Nabu Press"?

[Curtis Clark]

IANAL, but I have some familiarity with US copyright law:

On 3/28/2012 5:07 PM, Stephen Thorpe wrote:
> well, yes, confirmation should be sought from an authority higher than me, certainly! However, some thoughts for what they are worth:
> (1) is the BHL use of the publication really "non-commercial"?? Don't people at BHL get paid? Isn't it a commercial company of sorts?

Immaterial. Any copyright holder can grant specific broad licenses, for 
non-commercial use, use with no derivatives, etc. Creative Commons, for 
example, is based on specific license of rights. In general, under 
current law, you can only give up rights explicitly, although in older 
works you had to explicitly declare rights.

> (2) since anybody can get the item free on BHL, the authors/publishers are not losing any money from people buying the item from Nabu, so no victim, no crime?

If a copyright is registered with the Copyright Office, there are 
specified statutory damages which are independent of actual damages. So 
you could recover the statutory damages no matter what, and if the 
actual damages were greater, you could go after them. And the profits 
made by Nabu are damages, even if BHL is giving it away for free.

> (3) I suspect Nabu are exploiting a grey area, rather than gambling that nobody will bother to take the matter to court (i.e., taking the matter to court wouldn't be successful, as it is unclear if any law is being broken, and since nobody is losing money, the matter would not be taken very seriously)

If in fact BHL owns the copyright, and licenses non-commercial use (and 
did not license the Nabu Press use), US copyright law is being broken. 
However, if the copyright were not registered, there's little advantage 
in trying to enforce copyright unless you already have your own staff of 
attorneys.

-- 
Curtis Clark        http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark
Biological Sciences                   +1 909 869 4140
Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona CA 91768