Re: Acrobat PDF & Accessibility

> WARNING: All rights reserved. Unauthored duplication is a violation of 
> applicable laws.
> 
> As you see, "duplication" is prohibited, but nothing is said about converting 
> to other (different) formats, either to audio tape on cassette deck or to mp3 
> on hard drive. 

That's a derivative work, the creation of which is one of the rights that
is reserved.  You are left with the doctrine of "fair use", which basically
says that certain copying operations may be permitted for the public good
or because they don't harm the copyright owners revenues.  This tends to
be a matter of case law in most countries, although some have specific
exemptions.  My feeling would be that scanning into a computer would not
normally be considered fair use (most books published in the UK have explicit
notices forbidding the placing of the content in document retrieval systems,
and, recently, the wording of this tends to have been revised to cover 
modern technology explicitly).

With copyright, protection is automatic unless the copyright owner gives
a licence, or "fair use" applies.  You don't have to declare a published
work copyright and you don't have to explicitly ban derivative works for
you to be able to take legal action against someone who creates derivative
works.

I think there are special exemptions for talking books for the blind in
some countries, possibly agreed with the publishers, rather than in 
legislation, and normally tied to special formats that won't play on normal
consumer machines.

IANAL.

Received on Friday, 28 December 2001 17:00:11 UTC