Re: Publishing and Linking - Some thoughts for Thursday

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 7:53 PM, ashok malhotra
<ashok.malhotra@oracle.com> wrote:
> Surely we can say
> "If you link to or include illegal or seditious material you could be
> prosecuted"
>
> I think you need to say something like this to set up for further discussion
> of
> copying such material by proxies and manipulation of such material, etc.
> which
> the document spends quite a lot of time on.
>
> Another "finding" that I see from this discussion is that we need machine
> readable
> policies spelling out what proxies and archives, etc, can do with website
> material.

Whether we need such protocols will be a matter of debate in every
case, and we can't come down on any side or even say anything very
general.

We might say that if the legal default rule (in any jurisdiction) is
to prohibit some action, then it is useful (technically and socially
enabling) to have a documented protocol for communicating legal
exceptions (licenses, etc.). CC REL is an example of such a protocol;
DRM bypasses for public domain or licensed material would be another
(I don't know whether these exist). Whether any such protocol becomes
legally recognized is a complicated process about which we probably
don't have anything to say.

Jonathan

> All the best, Ashok
>
>
> On 6/19/2012 4:03 PM, Jeni Tennison wrote:
>>
>> Ashok,
>>
>> On 19 Jun 2012, at 20:48, ashok malhotra wrote:
>>>
>>> I read the publishing and Linking draft again and I'm wondering if we can
>>> make statements like:
>>>
>>> - If you include copyrighted material you violate copyright.  If you link
>>> to it
>>> you may not violate copyright
>>>
>>> - If you include of link to illegal material you can the prosecuted for
>>> "aiding
>>> and abetting"
>>>
>>> - If you include or link to seditious material you can be prosecuted by
>>> the
>>> prevailing government
>>>
>>> - If you have a copyright to printed material that carries over to its
>>> electronic form
>>
>> I'd be worried that those are debatable assertions about legal truth which
>> are beyond what we know or could advise people on.
>>
>>> Also, Best practice 1 says "Legislation that forbade transformations on
>>> unlawful material would similarly limit the services that service providers
>>> could provide."  I don't know what that means
>>
>> Say you have a law that says that you can't manipulate pornographic images
>> involving children. 'Manipulate' here might mean converting from one image
>> format to another, or cropping, or adjusting colour balance and so on. The
>> law might be attempting to enable prosecution of people who handle the
>> unlawful images as well as those who took them.
>>
>> Now say that you have a service on the web that provides a facility for
>> doing things like image format conversion, or cropping of images so that
>> they can be used as avatars, or provides online image manipulation of other
>> kinds. In an environment where manipulating unlawful images in this way was
>> forbidden, such a service would have to check all the images that were put
>> through the service to ensure that they weren't unlawful; it would be
>> impossible to run such a service.
>>
>> The point is that when you have automated processing of something, it's
>> hard for services to comply with restrictions on what can be processed,
>> because computers can't tell what's lawful and what's unlawful.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Jeni
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 20 June 2012 00:51:56 UTC