GrafoDexia

This site is devoted to copyright and issues of 'intellectual property,' particularly the issue's analytical aspects. It also concerns itself with the gap between public perception and the true facts, and with the significant lag time between the coverage on more technical sites and the mainstream press. For site feed, see: http://grafodexia.blogspot.com/atom.xml To see the list of sites monitored to create this site, see: http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=CopyrightJournal

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Legal shenanigans around the public domain. My understanding of the law here is that companies are under no obligation to provide public domain works that they have copies of, but that anyone who obtains such a copy can redistribute it. I don't know how the law works with "intent to distribute" as in the original case, but in this case I suspect he'd be ok since he was careful to take only public domain works. Unless he violated a hacking law somehow (unlikely, given the fairly trivial things that were required in the first attack), or ran afoul of the contract (very likely, given the all-encompassing nature of most click-through agreements these days).

It would be interesting to try to quantify quite how many public domain works are locked up inside paywalls. Easier to come up with a number of works than with a valuation on their economic value.

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