From: bruce@ais.com (Bruce C. Wright)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.admin.policy
Subject: Re: Harmlessness of a.b.p.e (long, but read it anyway)
Date: 19 Nov 92 11:12:39 GMT
Organization: Applied Information Systems, Chapel Hill, NC

In article <1992Nov18.003412.10710@news.columbia.edu>, dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis) writes:
> 
>    Since I have been arguing about copyright in relation to a.b.p.e, I felt
> I should explain more clearly and fully my point of view, and give others a
> chance to see my whole argument and to respond to it.
>    I believe that copyright must be anchored in the concept of harm, or it is
> of no value to society. We believe that copying and distributing other's work
> is bad. But when it is bad, it is so because of harm, and not because of some
> idealized model of human behavior.
>    This, of course, is not a legal argument. I do not pretend it is, and I do
> not think it could be used in a defense of a lawsuit.   [...]

Which is exactly what you might find yourself doing if you act on this
belief.

_Your_ opinion doesn't count.  Only the Court's opinion counts in such
matters.

In any event, your opinion does not agree with either copyright law
nor with court decisions on copyright law.  If someone sues you for
copyright violations, it is _not necessary_ for them to show that
they were harmed in order to get a court decision against you.  It
is only necessary to show copying beyond `fair use'.  It is quite
possible to get stuck with substantial civil penalties _even if you
did not profit one DIME from the copying_.  You may also be ordered
to pay the plaintiff's attorney fees and court costs;  it may also
issue an injunction against your activities, and if you persist after
that you can be found to be in contempt of Court.  Once the Court
decides against you it has wide discretion in setting the penalty;
it's not even up to the plaintiff (though of course they will probably
ask for substantial damages and/or penalties, otherwise why go through
with a lawsuit).

In the Event Horizons case, it was easy to put a _minimum bound_ on
the damages suffered:  the amount of money EH made reselling the
images -- presumably Playboy could have made the money themselves by
running their own BBS.  The damages might well have been greater,
by redistribution of the images by unknown third parties.  In any
case it wouldn't have been necessary to show damages at all, although
the fact of damages makes the lawsuit more attractive.

There are numerous people who have argued about whether there _ought_
to be intellectual property laws - Richard Stallings (sp?), of GNU
fame, for one.  But so far as I know he hasn't tried to appropriate
anyone else's copyrights -- just registered his opinion that the law
as it stands now is too restrictive.

Without this initial premise, most of your other arguments are fatally
flawed.  They could be taken as an argument for _changing_ the law,
but as an _interpretation_ of the existing law they are worthless.

>    Last is unorganization. Anybody still here?
>    Although it couldn't probably be considered fair use, it doesn't seem to
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> me to be particularly harmful if a person scans an image, and distributes it
> through usenet. The problem is that a.b.p.e has grow to very large size. But
> the fact remains that there is no leader, and no organizer, and each article
> is the whim of the individual poster.

This is entirely a _practical_ problem from the point of view of a
potential plaintiff.  It would be difficult to sue umpteen thousand
different sites, many of which would probably not really be aware of
specific copyright violations.  It would not be difficult to sue the
poster of such an item, although they may not get much money from a
starving student.  They could still obtain court injunctions to cease
and desist which from a copyright owner's point of view might be
almost as good.

>     This, I think is what the alt net was supposed to be about. Of course,
> you can get what you want from alt and leave the rest, but that's not the
> point.  The ideal of alt was an uncontrolled network. Totally uncontrolled.
> That means that ideally the only reason not to carry an alt group is it's
> unpopularity.  Otherwise you make _no_ judgments about it. To drop a group
> because some special interest group feels it is used to break laws is not
> quite the right way to think about it.

That's not the way I remember it.  The alt groups were created because
some people objected to the bureaucracy required to create a usenet group;
in fact many alt groups have migrated to groups in the normal usenet
hierarchy once they became permanent and accepted groups.  I don't recall
_anyone_ at the time making the argument that a blind eye would be turned
to any illegal activities in the alt groups -- in fact if that had been
the case I suspect that they would never have been created in the first
place.  Site administrators (both educational and commercial) as a group
are rather more conservative about such things than undergraduates :-).

In another article you mentioned that you felt that it was too restrictive
to avoid posting copyrighted material to the net, and that that infringed
on the `freedom' of the net & that there was too little uncopyrighted
material.  I disagree.  There is a _great_ _deal_ of uncopyrighted
material, or material with the equivalent of the GNU `copyleft' which
from the point of view of distribution on the net is nearly the same
thing.  It seems to me that the vast majority of the articles on the net
are in fact in this public-domain or `copyleft' category.

If the only way that you can find any value on the net is by pirating
other people's copyrighted works, then frankly I feel sorry for you.

Bruce C. Wright
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.admin.policy