[Taxacom] copyright infringement by "Nabu Press"?

[Stephen Thorpe]

actually, the case of second hand books may be relevant here ... I believe that it is legal to resell a book, but not to make copies and sell those
 
the relevance of this, is however, a bit ambiguous (particularly given the brave new world of the internet age, where old concepts tend to break down)
 
the grey area is this: at no stage in the process above are copies of the book made freely available to anyone who wants one (as BHL is doing in this case), so the question is, if someone were legally giving away free copies of a book to *anyone* who wanted one, could the restriction be imposed that nobody could get one, copy it, and sell the copies??
 
Stephen


________________________________
From: Geoff Read <gread at actrix.gen.nz>
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu 
Sent: Thursday, 29 March 2012 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] copyright infringement by "Nabu Press"?

Well this BHL diversion is getting a little silly, and is a red herring to
the issue raised.

BHL The Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of natural history and
botanical libraries, as a consortium does not hold any copyrights ..."

And:  "In addition to works in the public domain the BHL contains digital
versions of some works still under copyright for which the BHL has
obtained permission from the copyright holders. In these cases the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license applies.
Most of these works are journals published by non-profit learned societies
or research institutions whose mission is involved with biodiversity.

http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Licensing+and+Copyright

I thought everyone knew the basics of this stuff (or where to find it). :-)
Simply copying/digitising something (as Google and BHL do) doesn't give
you any rights over it, and you need permission first (ie BHL for post
1922 scientific society works) or be so powerful that people hesitate to
sue you (Google - but I think I saw a group of authors ARE going after
Google in a lawsuit).


Geoff


On Thu, March 29, 2012 1:35 pm, Curtis Clark wrote:
> 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



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