« David Bollier reviews 'Darknet' | Main | Music we played at Gnomedex »
What does it take to 'induce' infringement?
Siva Vaidhyanathan of NYU, the author of several books on copyright in the digital age, says of the 1970s-era ad above: "Consider this ad from Sony for the Betamax VCR. Would this induce copyright infringement?"
He gives his take on the court's Grokster decision at Salon. Excerpt:
There is one major difference between Grokster and Google. Grokster does no copying itself. It merely induces and enables.If anyone infringes, it's Google: The company caches millions of Web pages without permission (again, giving copyright holders the option of protesting). And soon it will offer millions of copyrighted books in electronic form without payment or permission. How would Google fare in a post-Grokster world? The publishing industry no doubt wonders. And it just might sue to find out.
Siva raises some excellent points that I hadn't considered earlier today.
Technorati tags: grokster
June 27, 2005 at 11:19 PM in Digital rights & copyright | Permalink
| Comments (2)
| 
| 
(1)
» The "record" button. from larry borsato
JD Lasica at Darknet asks "What does it take to 'induce' infringement?" That's easy. A "record" button. As soon as Sony put a record button on the Betamax VCR, they were clearly inducing infringement. Aren't makers of blank tapes, CDs,... [Read More]
Tracked on Jun 28, 2005 4:04:14 AM
Comments
Google caches content without the owners express permission, but the owner can easily exclude data from Google's cache, or even it's index entirely I believe. This is what has protected Google (apart from being hugely useful) in the most part I believe.
When compared with BetaMax, the publishers where saying that *nobody* had permission to copy their content unless they expressly said so. Broadcast media does not make it easy for publishers to explicitly state who can copy their data like the internet does. The position of the publishers over BetaMax was similar to basically everyone today deciding to robots.txt out Google, or setting nocache on everything, indicating that nobody was permitted to copy their content.
Their a huge amount of hypocrisy going on here. On the one hand people are saying how great Google are, yet slamming the broadcasters over events like BetaMax and the Broadcast flag for basically excersing an option which Google would let them excercise. The real issue people have is that they can't get stuff for free. And so you all whine about it. Sure the laws might be a bit iffy, but nobody has really helped solve this problem except for Google, who let the publishers decide, and if you don't respect the publishers descisions when it comes to the copyright of their content, you tend to end up breaking the law.
Now, Sony where not really inciting infringment when they stuck a record button on their BetaMax machines because it's up to the individual to respect the publishers copyright, not the device manufacturers. Well in theory, the big-names seem to be heading towards the retarded trusted computing / DRM laden evil machine. Isn't a VCR recorded analgous to a browsers internet cache anyway?
Posted by: Alex Stapleton | Jun 28, 2005 2:56:34 PM
I believe that under the DMCA, Google's caching (at least for the images, if not for the webpages too) is legal. In addition, I believe that the books are posted under agreement with the Author/Publisher and is not availible as a full text, but is only searchable.
Posted by: Kirk | Jun 28, 2005 5:25:57 PM
