In-Reply-To: 
Message-ID: 
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: O
X-Status: 



On Wed, 3 May 1995, Bijan Marashi wrote:

> have you investigated "cyberspace" law vis a vis this matter (or any 
> other similar matter...i doubt that the court has ruled on page caching).

There are precedents, news feeds or wires for example.  Also NRS has 
restrictions on what you can and can't do with the article (cache it in a 
unix or vms server as a read-by-all file) for "accidental publication".  
The replication rights like this can be negotiated to a very reasonable 
fee, (pennies/megabyte/user), but every major feed provider does require 
royalty negotiation.

> let's talk about the implications for a moment tho.  if doc caching was a 
> violation of copyright law, i think that cyberspace the way we know it 
> now and its future would be turned on it's head.  what if i print your 
> homepage?  what if i look at your homepage five times a day?  how is that 
> different than downloading it five times or downloading it once, for 24 
> hours.  also, document caching, as i understand it in the aol browser, is 
> something that can be toggled on and off.  why should aol be responsible 
> for caching, let's say, your homepage?  shouldn't the user who using the 

The key here is intent.  If AOL simply wants to lower the bandwidth 
through their backbones and disk drives, they could cache the content and 
just register a "hit"  for each access.  Again, feed providers don't 
require individual downloads for each access, just an accurate billing 
based on the terms of the license.  If the billing is "per hit", AOL 
might be better off buying a few thousand hits and sending a billing 
summary.  If the billing is "per user", AOL may want to buy a few hundred 
users to start and make sure they have enough users to cover the actual 
number of visitors.

> at present, users can highlight/copy text from your homepage and paste it 
> into a word document.  should all the browser companies be legally 

Many coprorations have corporate librarians who will look up sources from 
Dow Jones or Mead and then clip it for you.  You tell her how many people 
will be receiving the document and that information is sent back to the 
IP, along with a payment (usually for several thousand "pages" per month).

For a few hundred thousand, you can distribute all the copies you want,
for a limited period of time.

For the most part, the concern is "operative practices".  Copying a 
single press release and distributing it (with proper attribution) to
a mailing list once in a while might even be viewed as "free publicity".
Mass mailing daily clips to 20 or 30 e-mail users requires a contract.

> responsible for these actions as well? as a matter of fact, the court 
> ruled in Wright v. Warren books (i believe that this was the case) that  
> copying large amounts of text from online databases for personal use is 
> "fair use".  moreover, the copyright act of 1976 indicates that an 
> owner's right of control of her work is exhausted after it has first gone 
> public.

Copyrights are enforced under a license.  The default is that you are 
seeing the only copy you are allowed to make.  The other extreme would be
something like the general public license which virtually forces 
mass-disclosure.  The author can make whichever license he chooses.

> so perhaps it is time for cyberspace laws to emerge.  i'm not a 
> lawyer(and don't have much of a desire to be one) but it seems like your 

Cyberspace laws have been emerging very carefully for over 20 years now.  
The copyright act of 1976 enabled the protection of expressions 
distributed electronically.  Precidents and settlements have led to a
series of "gentlemen's understandings" when one comes to the bargaining 
table.  Somewhere between "all bits are free" and "any combination of two 
bytes is mine", is the prarie of intellectual property rights 
negotiations.  Rates can run as high as 50 cents/byte (real-time stock 
quotes) to as cheap as 5 cents/gigabyte (GPL on CD-Rom over NFS).

> position might be difficult to defend as a result of a)anachronistic 
> legal institutionns/laws  and b) the way it would implicate other 
> internetworking technologies.

If AOL is caching hits for the purpose of underreporting hits, then AOL 
is engaging in fraudulent behavior.  I would guess that Bill and AOL 
might be able to work out some terms on large volume discounts and 
alternate reporting.

> that's my two cents.

This was worth about $60 (my time to type it), $60,000 (the impact on the 
royalty infrastructure).

> bijan
> 

	Rex Ballard
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.



From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue May  9 00:30:08 1995