The west is learning fast from the east (meaning east europe) :)
The communist countries were setup in such way that everybody living a normal life was definitely breaking some law. Hey even using a fax machine was illegal (but companies needed to have it to operate a business).
So, to get you, the government (and some random state company) needed just to put you on the list and you are arrested.
"It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection," and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever."
If you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, what's the incentive to be in the "don't* category?
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.
So you can't find out if you've infringed copyright by making a cached copy (and if your browser is creating a re-usable, loadable at another time, HTML format backup of the page for cache purposes, it is a copy) until after loading the page and reading the copyright notice?
If only there were a way to transmit data ahead of the page body itself to indicate whether you should be permitted to store a cached copy of the page or not...
It's generally held that if you serve a webpage you grant an implicit licence to do what's required to the incoming signal to it in order to enjoy what's served. I think it's wrong to think you even need a copyright licence to do it (see above), but there you go.
If you want to restrict usage of your website, don't use copyright, use a standard contract. You provide a service (serving a resource, e.g. a page) if a user accepts your terms of service. Also use technological measures: if your ToS aren't accepted, don't accept requests for that page. If you really want to restrict use of your site, make your site a walled garden; anybody not accepting your ToS before consuming your content then is committing digital trespass or even fraud, contrary to the Computer Misuse Act (UK).
Copyright is redundant here.
I wonder whether protocol and technical aspects provide a defense to this. If I request a page from your web site and I get back 200 OK, is that not some kind of permission? If then I receive an instruction to cache the page (or elements thereof), is that not some kind of encouragement to keep a copy? If the page has a permissive robots.txt, or even by choice no robots.txt, does it not indicate that visitors are welcome to come and store the copy for indexing purposes?
You would think so, but technical arguments seem to get ignored in these matters. For example, so-called "deep linking". Controlling direct access to Web resources is a solved technical problem, and if someone has a URL that responds to a basic GET then, hey, it must be intended for that; that's how it works. Yet it still ends up as fodder for endless legal manuevers.
Things are done to give the police the tools to fight whatever social ill currently obsesses the political class, however clumsily drawn.
They'll arrest protesters at an event and let them go 48 hours later with no intention of ever charging them. Politicians really want indefinite internment of terrorists. Because they're probably right that nobody will abuse it.
No privacy for drivers.
The age of consent of 16 DOESN'T exist to stop 13/14/15 year olds having sex. It is set at 16 to make (Victorian) child prostitution dead easy to convict. Covertly having sex with any age of teenager who is discreet would be easy. Pimping them would get me in real trouble though.
It is assumed that all these powers will never be abused, because there is so much undetected and unprosecuted crime that the police don't have the time or inclination to abuse them. But they are there when they need them. The British police would never be so ungentlemanly, like those nuclear sub crews who protect their launch enablers with bicycle locks. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/UltimateDe...) When you have a social contract, you don't need enforcement, just the enablement of enforcement against badness.
This is a nice little rant, but the UK Government has already been defeated on terrorist detention. That happened years ago.
Furthermore, the age of consent applies only to adults. If you are under 18 then not only does the CPS have a strong duty to determine if prosecution is in the public interest, it may not even be a crime at all if your age is close.
There are valid things to argue against, like temporary detention with no intention of charging. Given that, please don't add in a bunch of rubbish that dilutes your point.
> If you are under 18 then not only does the CPS have a strong duty to determine if prosecution is in the public interest, it may not even be a crime at all if your age is close.
I'm not too invested in whatever the heck your parent poster was saying, but you seem to have supported his point that "age of consent laws exist to easily convict people pimping child prostitutes." 17 year olds don't seek out child prostitutes.
(1) The headlines to the various articles reproduced in Meltwater News are capable of being literary works independently of the article to which they relate.
(2) The extracts from the articles reproduced in Meltwater News with or without the headline to that article are capable of being a substantial part of the literary work consisting of the article as a whole.
(3) Accordingly the copies made by the end-user's computer of (a) Meltwater News (i) on receipt of the email from Meltwater, (ii) opening that email, (iii) accessing the Meltwater website by clicking on the link to the article and (b) of the article itself when (iv) clicking on the link indicated by Meltwater News are and each of them is, prima facie, an infringement of the Publishers' copyright.
(4) No such copies are permitted (a) by s.28A CDPA dealing with temporary copies, or (b) as fair dealing within s.30 CDPA, or (c) by the Database Regulations.
(5) Accordingly, the end-user requires a licence from NLA or the Publishers, whether or not in the form of the WEUL in order lawfully to receive and use the Meltwater News Service.
Which is not about the user copying but Meltwater's summaries and distribution of them being illegal. Google should note this and immediately stop crawling the internet in the UK as this behaviour is clearly illegal as headlines are creative works.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Google had numerous discreet licencing agreements with UK copyright trolls in place already
A key difference between Meltwater and Google News is that Meltwater is charging the end user for the excerpts they scraped (I'm not going to contact their account managers to try to understand their pricing structure, but I strongly suspect that it includes a component related to level of usage and or quantity of targeted content served).
Meltwater's service is more analogous to Factiva and LexisNexis, whose licencing structure is almost certainly more favourable to the publishers.
It ought to be of some concern to other providers of SaaS feed readers, media analytics and the like though.
Would an effective way to forestall this be to set up a website and start suing anyone who visits it from the UK for copyright infringment? I would expect that such lawsuits would be laughed out of court, or strongly ruled in favor of the defendant, especially if you started out by suing fairly powerful or influential people.
(Also, is it legal to read books in the UK? The brain and eyes make a temporary copy of any inputs, and memory could be considered to be a derivative work.)
There is already lots of precedent that viewing a web page is making a copy. The law on child pornography is that it's only an offense to produce an image - since it's assumed that the person making the image is the one harming the child and banning reading/viewing something would have freedom of speech implications.
There have been many convictions of people viewing images where the prosecution made the case that the browser had created an image (albeit a copy)
The UK doesn't quite have a concept of freedom of speech, legally speaking. Freedom of expression is guaranteed by their Human Rights Act, but it has lots of limitations (incitement to racial/religious hatred, defamation), and there is illegal literature (mostly stuff relating to terrorism, but also "material that tend to deprave and corrupt those reading or viewing it")[1].
Therefor, I suspect that your mentions of legality may be specific to the USA; of course, if I'm wrong, I would love to be enlightened.
I don't think your comparison with reading is a good one. A cache copy persists and can be used, reused or passed on if desired whilst a visual appearance in your brain can not ... until we get really good at reading brain waves!
If I read a book I can pass on my memories of it, and someone with a more reliable memory might be able to recreate it. Admittedly, it would have a much larger rate of errors than copies recovered from cache, but there are plenty of things you can do with books that would have a similar rate of errors while still being violations of copyright.
Ya know... maybe that's the way to resolve this. Google should simply "drop" all their .uk data. The immense public outrage should get something done pretty quickly.
Honestly I think the only way to deal with the BS that we're being handed at the moment is complete and total compliance. Turn off browser caching for uk websites, deindex all uk sites from search engines, and drop Set-Cookie headers for everyone in Europe. One hour of the internet like that and everyone will realise how stupid these laws they're bringing in are.
Is there a more neutral source for information on the impact of this? Intuitively I'm thinking that the precedent set is more complex than is made out here.
They give an OutLaw link in the article, they're pretty highly regarded but I've not checked the background to verify that their article is independent of the OP's link or the companies involved.
I seriously think that most of the copyright folks dont get what is information law and policy. Especially, in Europe. People still think "bits" as "atoms". I guess it will take at least a decade to bring significant change in the way they think as old guard will be leaving the post.
The ruling not only causes absurdity/doesn't work, it's wrong in law to boot. I hope this goes to the UK Supreme Court. It's very dangerous: it effectively means that if I look at a picture on the floor I'm not breaking copyright (because I'm not making a copy), but if I view in on a public server I can be held to be in breach of copyright. Just because there are technological steps involved in delivering the picture to my eyes, copyright law suddenly applies, and hard. Copyright is not meant to limit the reading of works, merely their reproduction where such reproduction is marketable/commercially relevant. Browsing a webpage must be viewed as the sort of merely transient "copying" that is not a restricted act. There is no permanence in the act and the viewer doesn't take possession of a copy with which he can then compete in the marketplace which the rightsholder is supposed to have a state-granted monopoly over.
Wrong in law:
The Ecommerce Directive (2001/29) says that, subject to certain conditions, copies made during transmission by a third party or in your ram, cache, etc, are not reproductions covered by copyright law. The leading case on this is called Infopaq, which summarises:
- the act is temporary;
- it is transient or incidental;
- it is an integral and essential part of a technological process;
- the sole purpose of that process is to enable lawful consumption of the work or a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary of a lawful use of a work or protected subject-matter; and
- the act has no independent economic significance.
The recital (explanatory notes) to this exemption is this: "The exclusive right of reproduction should be subject to an exception
to allow certain acts of temporary reproduction, which are transient or incidental reproductions, forming an integral and essential part of a technological process and carried out for the sole purpose of enabling (...) lawful use of a work or other subject-matter to be made. To the extent that they meet these conditions, this exception should include acts which enable _browsing_ as well as acts of _caching_ to take place, including (...)"
The court in Meltwater says that the copies made by the users (which, it says, are unlicensed and thus infringing copies) are not exempt. Its reasoning hinges mostly on the fourth point. It uses circular logic despite accusing the defence of using the same: "A person making a copy of a
webpage on his computer screen will not have a defence under s. 28A CDPA simply because he has been browsing. He must first show that it was lawful for him to have made the copy. The copy is not part of the technological process; it is generated by his own volition. The whole point of the receipt and copying of Meltwater News is to enable the End User to receive and read it. Making the copy is not an essential and integral part of a technological process but the end which the process is designed to achieve. Storage of the copy and the duration of that storage are matters within the End User's control. It begs the question for decision whether making the copy is to enable a lawful use of the work.
This judgement presupposes that a copy is being deliberately made by the user; therefore it 'begs the question' whether the steps leading to that are excepted or not (because this is not lawful consumption). This is of course very flawed: when viewing a .jpg or Meltwater news from a remote server, we are not creating a meaningful copy of it, any more than receiving a broadcast on your TV set. That only happens once you hit Ctrl+S. Because you're just viewing (consuming, not copying) what's placed in plain sight, any RAM/cache/whatnot is in fact incidental to lawful consumption. The court thinks that you cannot consume digital work without meaningfully copying it - because it exists once on the server and they think it can exist simultaneously on many, many different users' terminals. But that is no more 'copying' (in the copyright sense) than happens on TVs in broadcasting (since you ignore all incidental technologically necessary 'copies' that lead up to the display of the work), and is precisely the opposite of what the law (Art 5(1) Ecommerce Directive) says.
They consider Infopaq, but all too superficially. From Infopaq: "23. According to the Højesteret, it is not disputed in this case that consent from the rightholders is not required to engage in press monitoring activity" - loading the websites so they can be read (and summarised by hand, or whatever else you want to do that doesn't store a copy of the words). Infopaq objects to the OCR and printing. I don't know if/why this was not flagged up in Meltwater. Infopaq seems poorly considered in that case.
Absurd:
- If the mere display of a .JPG were a copy, each re-rendering of the page (scrolling, zooming, AJAX refresh, etc) would be a separate potential infringement, wouldn't it? In fact, each refresh (60 times a second) would be creating an infringing copy.
- everyone (even rightsholders) clearly think there is no infringement possible by mere browsing, otherwise if the traffic lights system goes ahead anyone clicking on a redlighted link is immediately an infringer (because they will be making infringing copies of unlicensed content). It would then be absurd for google to even list the site. In fact Google wouldn't even be able to re-spider it from the instant it is redlighted. Infringement detection agents couldn't safely visit it. Nobody could. That is clearly not what the PRS is suggesting with their traffic light scheme, unless I'm vastly mistaken (or that is in fact their cunning plan).
- if the publisher of a work doesn't want her copy of the work to be available to the public, she can simply stop making it available to the public. If nobody has actually made a copy which they can go on using or serving to the public themselves (which I don't deny would be a restricted act), the work stops being available to the public. If I circumvent the way she sets up her property to reflect her wishes, just to be able to cast eyes upon the work, she at the very least has the Computer Misuse Act to remedy the trespass onto her server. She does not require copyright infringement remedies for that. Horses for courses thus combine to ensure total respect for the publisher without necessitating an expansion of copyright law that were it isn't required - viewing files on a server (nor, for reasons stated in my preceding emails, is it welcome there either).
- the picture on floor vs. picture on webpage dichotomy mentioned in my first paragraph: if it's can lawfully be retrieved and displayed (by looking at the picture on the floor, or requesting it, quite legitimately, from a server) then copyright shouldn't apply, but in Meltwater, it applies to the latter.
Any reading of the law that extends the law to where it serves no purpose at all, cannot befit the purpose of the law being read (and it sure ain't necessary in a democratic society, ney'ver).
Even if this were not the plain meaning of the law (which I showed above that it is), if for any reason a judge were to seek a purposive reading of the law (I have, for example, heard of Art 8 - right to private and family life - being applied in more surprising ways that protecting your right to browse the web without courts having the ability to find you in breach of the law for every page you visit - Branduse v Romania was about smelly prisons, ffs, not being able to forward your music, or deeplinks and headlines to your daughter - this allows the judge to use the Human Rights Act as authority for a strained, non-obvious interpretation of the law in order to respect european human rights law), I also think it be possible to read the text appropriately.
Just to follow up your note on the E-commerce Directive, is that the same point of European law that England accidentally/conveniently forgot to enact in its local interpretation?
I've heard what I suspect is the same issue raised before, in the context of End User Licence Agreements. The question of how EULAs can have any legal standing if you don't buy the software directly from the copyright holder was raised: if a contract necessarily involves consideration in both directions, and you get nothing of value from the copyright holder in return for "agreeing" to their often onerous EULA after you've completed the purchase of your software from a third party, what right do they have to impose any conditions on you at all? The answer being debated was that by merely running the software in the normal manner for which it was purchased, you are inevitably making copies (in RAM etc.) and thus copyright law applies and you require a licence. Ah, but making transient copies in the course of normal use is excluded from copyright by the point of law we're discussing, right? Except that unless something changes since I last read about this, that point of law hasn't actually been legislated in England, and thus this shady argument for EULAs having some sort of legal weight isn't completely DoA.
Apologies for not citing the source of this argument. It was a rather interesting and well written paper, by a law student IIRC, but I regret that I didn't bookmark it at the time and have never been able to find it again since.
The communist countries were setup in such way that everybody living a normal life was definitely breaking some law. Hey even using a fax machine was illegal (but companies needed to have it to operate a business).
So, to get you, the government (and some random state company) needed just to put you on the list and you are arrested.