No, there is nothing whatsoever in my post in which I claim or insinuate that slashdot is illegal. Google republishes as much as the entirety of websites for profit and without commentary.

Read this page:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

Slashdot takes small portions of articles for the purpose of commentary, review, and education (and/or journalism). Its use generally have little to no effect upon the potential market. the amounts quoted are modest.

completely different from the google cacheing/republishing situation.

your "posted publicly" claim is bullshit. there is no theory in copyright law in which public performance, publishing, or aviailability somehow invalidate copyright. just because you hear a song on the bus doesn't mean that it's in the public domain or that you can therefore makes CDs of it and start selling it.

"Fair use" is about the recipient (a.k.a. the user, the buyer, the reseller and such terms), and other second and possibly third parties, holding some limits on therights holder's ability to enforce copyright under certain circumstances. Saying Google's actions pass "no test of fair use whatsoever" because they might be opposed by the rights holder, or even cause some objectively verifiable problems for the rights holder, is like saying 'innocent until proven guilty' should be abolished because it doesn't help the state get convictions.

There is a clear four-pronged test of what constitutes fair use in the USA. Please explain to me how google's cachng of entire websites for profit is consistent with any of these. In fact, it very much violates two of them. You've written a long paragraph based on apparently your belief that "fair use" is some abstract concept. it isn't. Read the wikipedia page or wherever you need to go to learn about Fair Use 101 and get back to me.

    If your only goal is that the copyright holder be able to act without checks and balances

I never said or insinuated anything remotely like this. Shame on you for suggesting something like this. In fact, quite the opposite--I explicitly referred to fair use, which is a "check and balance" (though that's a horrible word choice) on the use of works.

"Cacheing" in double quotes because I contend it's actually republishing, or at least that the differences between the two are negligible.

You've written a lot of legalistic sounding bullshit without actually having any real understanding of what Fair Use is, it seems.

The Berne treaty has no bearing here. I am specifically asking about the legal theory, perfesser, under which you claim it is legal for google to do what it does - republish the content of entire websites for money without the creator's permission.. inside the USA, if you prefer to keep the discussion simple.

So, you are all for copyright as long as it has no teeth whatsoever and is just some purely symbolic aetherial concept, have I got that right? Also, you effectively favor it only for large entities that can take the time to patrol.. you know.. the whole internet.

copyright without enforcement is like talking about a god or ghost who has no effect on the real world. it's a violation of occam's razor and an absurdity.

did you even read my post?

caching is not linking, for one.

for fuck's sake these idiot ACs today.

"Don't post your information publicly if you don't want search engines to find it."

Irrelevant.

"Copyright holders have always had the burden of protecting their work."

Bollocks. Try opening "hawguy's house of CD-R copy musc" on a street corner The police will shut you down without any intervention from the rightsholders as you are engaging in criminal copyright infringement.

Your "should theaters" argument here is braindead. The correct question should be "should cinemas that consistently play movies that they have no rights to to paying customers be shut down?" and the answer is clearly yes.

I've read two spectacularly poor responses to my post so far. Yours was slightly less stupid than the previous one, but I nevertheless shudder of what awaits me below.

No, it most certainly is NOT like "quoting a portion of a book for book review." It is an extraordinarily large "portion" (often the whole thing) and there is no "review."

As far as "people should be thankful.." I've covered that.

You've not made a single fucking argument. And I'm using the f word because your "basically equivalent" statement is so spectacularly weak it shows you didn't even put a second of thought into writing your post.

Look - I know many of you are *philosophically* opposed to copyright. Fine. Whatever.

But put that aside for a moment and take it as a given that copyright exists. I really struggle understanding how it is legal, other than 'google has expensive lawyers' that one private entity can take the contents of another website, store them, and then essentially re-publish them for money (google is largely advertiser supported, even if the adverts dont necessarily directly appear on the cached page). This is especially true when you see here that google's actions can directly reputationally harm one of those whose site is is "caching."

Really, under what theory is this remotely consistent with copyright as we understand it? It passes no test of "fair use" whatsoever.

Notice that my comments aren't in any way related to whether the google caching is useful from a user's standpoint. Of course it is or can be. But, from a copyright standpoint, I have a lot of sympathy with righsholders.

Note also that the argument that "getting your stuff copied" should be an opt-out situation (as in "well, you can always put a robots.txt" or "you can always do steps x y and z") i find weak. this is what in essence we have with the DMCA and youtube - and you see it takes all of an instant from the time that any given video is taken down to the time that it's up again in some other form Rightsholders have to have *full time* people involved in policing sites like youtube.. something just isnt right about that.

If google is indeed providing a useful service to company/site x/y/z, then company x/y/z should be able to welcome such caching by an opt-in robots.txt. the current situation, given how copyright law actually exists in most jurisdiction, is perverse.

So, on your planet where market forces of supply and demand don't work, does gravity make things fall upward or what exactly do we have going on here?

" If legislation is passed that makes it more expensive for companies to operate, prices go up."

If prices go up and users still pay equally, then any economist will tell you either...
- prices were too low before and/or
- the companies have excessive market power

in either case, the items we're talking about here are expensive enough that it isnt the case of adobe artifically cheapening their price to keep out competitors. does adobe have excessive market power? you tell me: GiMP and other such tools are avialable for free. sounds to me like that they made a good product people want, despite there being cheap alternatives.

let's be clear what you are saying: you are saying that the developer must provide EXTRAORDINARY value (life long updates on a $5-$10 product?) for you to consider not pirating it. Behold, the entitled snowflake consumer.

Subby: don't listen to this and other snowflakes that will permeate this thread and mark me 'troll.'. You'll get a lot of advice here which amounts to not much more than you subsidizing their greed and limitless expectation.

You'll also get crapola "sage advice" like "Trying to deter piracy with DRM is a losing battle" here on slashdot. It gets "+5 insightful", but it's not. Sure, everything will get hacked, but the dirty little secret is DRM works. DRM works because it reduces the RATE of piracy. Behold the PS3. People DESPERATELY tried to hack it for years with great rewards to the cracker, but it wasnt cracked until many years after the fact, and even then it was more trouble than it was worth. I refer you again to the dictum "don't listen to the snowflakes." They will try to mislead you and in fact are doing so on this thread.

This is what I suggest:

1. charge a fair price for your product. compete on quality, not price.
2. NOTHING is unhackable, but use mechanisms that will lead to you getting a good income stream. the better known appstores are a good start. Far from perfect, but you'll reach plenty of honest people too.
3. if you want to sell it yourself (or if the product demands it), make the product 'phone home' regularly to validate its license. make it part of your license that the app MUST phone home every so often and cannot be blocked by firewall, etc. You'll get longwinded speeches here and elsewhere from customers who claim they would buy but for your evil, crazy DRM, but, again, ignore the snowflakes.
4. make regular updates. if you're particularly fussed, find out how your stuff is hacked, make it conditional that users must have current version for benefit X, and work against any hacks found. or, don't bother. I honestly think it's pretty much ethically perfectly fair to retaliate against those who pirate your stuff, but we don't and you shouldn't (oh, here come the responses!).
5. have a thick skin when it comes to entitled snowflakes and the Tech Profits and Futurists who will tell you that DRM is dead, that you should sell T-Shirts but give your app away, that you should FOSS it and live off of the sweet dew of reputation, or any other such idealistic crapola.

/ yes, this is a voice of relatively successful experience talking here.

how, exactly, is shagg's comment "insightful?"

1. the idea that "file sharing is already legal" is a meaningless statement. it's like saying that "driving a car is legal." yes, it's legal on roads for licensed drivers. it is not legal to drive through a busy shopping mall a la blues brothers.

2. 'file sharing' and 'copyright infringment' are not the same thing. who said they are? however, in the USA, "sharing" of copyrighted music and film, for example, for all but a very limited set of exceptions as defined in fair use and as the vast majority of 'file transactions' in practice are, is very much are copyright infringement.

i fail to see anything 'insightful' in shagg's comments. at best he's shooting down linguistic strawmen of his own creation - at worst, he's flat our wrong.

This is a very tough case.

Copyright Law exists in order to further the useful arts by balancing the needs of the producer and the needs of the public. Let's look beyond the cheap shots that have already begun to permetate this thread and discuss in those terms.

Basically, this ruling amounts to telling wiley and sons (the producers) that they cannot reliably price discriminate for foreign markets. you might say "so what? tough cookies." but let's think about that for a moment.

basically, wiley has two choices at what price to set the textbooks at in thailand -

Price A - low price that thais can afford.
Price B - USA price or near to it

with price A, they can engage in fair competition in the thai market and earn a fair profit. at this price, they dont have too much to fear from piracy.
with price B, they can expect to sell few copies as piracy will be rampant. as it is highly unlikely that this is at the profit maximizing price, their profits will be lower.

this ruling basically compels them to either sell in thailand (a presumably much smaller market than the usa) at a price closer to price B or to make economically useless changes to their textbooks to make them unsaleable in the USA, such as printing them only in the thai language. or, they can do even worse stuff like arguing for import tarriffs from thailand to the usa on books.

even worse, it prevents them from doing things like giving away their textbooks in africa at a loss.

and even then, if they have to price at price B in thailand, their unit cost goes up and presumably they might have to raise the prices of US textbooks. a lose-lose.

first sale doctrine is important, but i dont see why it must apply accross borders given that there are other legitimate considerations, including the need to educate globally.

i cant say that this is a bad ruling, as ive not read the rulings, but offhand this issue is far more complex and in need of serious thought than some are giving it credit for here.

bollocks. it is not fair use. it is some guy...

a) posting an entire discovery channel documentary and then claiming that it is "fair use" because of fair use's education provision, though anybody with half a brain could see that such a claim does not stand up.
b) posting a whole movie and then claiming "fair use" under god knows what theory.
c) some guy claiming "fair use" because he used a commercial piece of music as the background for his something else.

none of those have been interpreted as fair use. in fact, almost NOTHING on youtube that is claimed as "fair use" actually is.

the idea that there is a real "illegitimate DMCA request" problem is fud. there is none. for every 1 actual illegitimate dmca request, i'm sure there are 10,000 infringing videos on youtube. your issue is FUD, FUD, FUD.

No, that's NOT the logic i'm using. And, in fact, if you read the first paragraph of what I wrote, it's very very explicitly NOT the logic I am using.

You are attempting to apply law like a computer program. And, sorry, but LAW DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. Your slippery slope analogy DOES NOT APPLY.

In actual law and policy:

- intent matters
- quantity matters
- judgment matters

these things are the difference between intenetional murder and a regrettable accident.

But thank you for an entirely predictable foil post for me to re-emphasize the key point.

As far as this goes:

>Copyright infringement comes down to one thing, as a society do we want free access to art or do we want to only allow the privileged who can afford it, to have >access.

This is an utter and total oversimplification of a complex problem and you should be ashamed for having written this, though as you missed the key point of my first post, I am not so surprised.

Except their automatic filter is ridiculously bad for filtering out basically anything except for recent content by top label bands and recent TV shows, in both cases based on audio samples. You can watch pretty much every copyrighted documentary ever made, get tens of thousands of full length movies, and much more with trivial searches, most of which have been up for a long time and are never taken down. It is only the most obvious of obvious stuff that gets taken down, and even that gets back up in another form trivially fast The only things that really get taken down are the ones where rightsholders have been forced to pay people to sit there full time to write DMCA notices and/or the likely candidates who will sue them. So, youtube has a "don't sue us" filter, but that's about it.

I'd like to say that unlike most of you (most of you who post, anyway), I am, in a broad brush "against" mega. The test of copyright infringement in all countries in not a simple yes/no, but rather depends on things like intent, amount of material involved, for profitness, etc. And, when put against such tests, it is clear that megaupload's entire business model was as a facilitator of copyright infringing materials. I don't think there's any legitimate claim for him to be a "common carrier" as an impartial ISP. I agree with the takedown of his site and the seizure of his ill-gotten gains.

HOWEVER

If you read the wiki page on mega, specifically the "basis of indictment" bullet points, what strikes me is this: the exact same list can easily be levied against youtube, which I content is also a business, like megaupload, fundamentally built upon copyright infringement. YouTube is slightly more clever in that they attract non-infringing users to better mask their infringing activities, but still fundamentally the vast bulk of youtube advertising dollars come from showing copyright infringing content. Like megaupload, it has as kiddy-pron filter that works and yet while the same filter could be trivially tweaked or built upon to block at least a good portion of blatantly infringing content, it is not. Furthermore, both youtube and mega technically claim to be DMCA-takedown compliant, but both make legitimate rightsholders go through the maximal numbers of hoops to submit claims AND have trivial mechanisms for replacement of taken-down content (in mega's case, the 'link' system, in youtube's case, users just create another logon and re-upload).

So, if there's one thing REALLY wrong with this case, it's not relatively small prosecutorial oversteps in going after mega. rather, it's the unequalness where mega was procecuted but youtube allows to steam on. do a youtube search for 'full movie' to see how bad it is. we all know that we can find more or less whatever we want on youtube, plus or minus a few recent items from popular/current shows where the rightsholders actively police youtube (like the latest family guy episodes).

in all cases, it is the creators of content, the very people that we should protect the most, that get screwed.