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 Administrative / General / 3744
3743  |  3745
Subject: 
Re: Policy clarification regarding catalogs
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.dear-lego
Date: 
Sat, 18 Dec 1999 00:30:48 GMT
Reply-To: 
mattdm@mattdm.org+Spamless+
Viewed: 
1537 times
  
Todd Lehman <lehman@javanet.com> wrote:
technically legal from a linkage standpoint, it's still possible to that the
*act of snooping around* (i.e., not following proscribed links) might
arguably be an invasion of privacy, which would be bad.

If it would help, I'll post a list of all possible URLs (of a given length
and/or fitting current patterns) under <URL:http://www.lego.com/>.


Also, a JPEG image served by a webserver but not linked to from anywhere
might not actually have been "published" from a legal standpoint.  I'm sure
it's a gray area, but I certainly would not automatically equate "serving"
with "publishing."

I'm not a legal expert, despite my strong opinions, but thanks to the power
of online dictionaries, I'm able to offer these definitions of publishing:

From <URL:http://www.wld.com/conbus/orans/orandefn.asp?term_id=4401>

  Publication

    Making public. For example, in copyright law, publication is offering a
    book, a movie, etc., to the public by sale or other distribution [....]

From
<http://www.nolo.com/dictionary/dictionary_alpha.cfm?wordnumber=435&alpha=P>

  Published Work

    An original work of authorship that is considered published for purposes
    of copyright law. A work is "published" when it is first made available
    to the public on an unrestricted basis. It is thus possible to display a
    work, or distribute it with restrictions on disclosure of its contents,
    without actually "publishing" it. Both published and unpublished works
    are entitled to copyright protection, but some of the rules differ.


This of course brings up the question of: what does "unrestricted" mean? I
think "being served from their web server, under the general copyright
notice which applies to their whole site, with no technical restrictions of
any kind" certainly counts. Some might think that not having links on the
front page image is some sort of restriction, but this is contrary to the
established working of the Internet. (Which is what makes me get all worked
up about this, of course.)



And if I remember right, the HTTP RFC mentions that it's a bug if web
servers serve documents not meant to be public. (Warning: following
reasoning is at least slightly tongue-in-cheek.) Implying that in a
correctly configured web server, all served documents are those meant to be
published. So claiming that something was available by mistake is like a
newspaper saying "Ooops! We didn't mean to print that article! You're
violating our copyright if you read it!" But more importantly, if something
is _intentionally_ served by the web server, it implies that it is meant to
be available to the public.


--
Matthew Miller                      --->                  mattdm@mattdm.org
Quotes 'R' Us                       --->             http://quotes-r-us.org/



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Policy clarification regarding catalogs
 
(...) As far as I am aware, Matthew is correct. If the URLs were originally contained in pages encountered via normal click-navigation[1], then the only legal issue would be the terms of use regarding images at the originating site. (And (...) (25 years ago, 17-Dec-99, to lugnet.admin.general)

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