On Wed, 25 Jul 2001 aleph1at_private wrote: > The are quite a few responses to this thread but its painfully obvious > that no one is quite sure if what they are saying is backed by law. > Lots of IANAL. So unless someone with more than a simply opinion posts > I'll kill the thread here. I am not a lawyer, but... Recently I have been doing a lot of reading with regard to copyright law and it's effects in the 'digital realm'[1] - all my information it from New Zealand copyright law, however that is based on British law and is party to international treaties (Berne Convention 1928 and Universal Copyright Convention 1952). My assumptions are based on current law, which is not cut out to handle the adaptions brought about by the internet. Copyright ownershave the following rights on all their works: To copy the work; To issue copies of the work in public; To perform the work in public; To play the work in public; To show the work in public; To broadcast the work; To make an adaption of the work; To do any of the above acts in relation to an adaption of the work; To authorise another person to do any of these acts; Copyright protection is automatic. Copyright owners also have moral rights (from the Berne Convention) which unlike copyright cannot be assigned, however they can be waived - these are: The right to be identified as the author of a work (right of attribution); The right to object to any distortion or modification of a work where that treatment is prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author (right of integrity); In the case of computer code such as the telnetd exploit the author could make it available to individuals without weakening his position as copyright owner of the work. The act of posting it to a public forum such as Bugtraq is either showing the work in public, or broadcasting it - in either case, if that act is not done by the copyright holder or a party he has authorised to do that, then it is an infringement. As far as a cracker placing his copyright code on another machine, that would be seen as issuing a copy of the work, the administrator would be within their right to remove it I imagine, but alteration would be an infringement. It could be argued that the configuration of your system 'just so' is a protected work, a cracker placing code on that system would be modifying your work, which is an infringement. Coders who right GPL code are authorising the public as a whole to perform any protected act. They do however retain their moral right, in that they retain credit and GPL code cannot be used in commercial software (the right of integrity). The US also has the DMCA of course, which introduces a number of new protections and alters some aspects of fair use. I am not sure how they would impact on this. Notes: [1] I am preparing a submission for the New Zealand Government based on the discussion paper "Digital Technology and The Copyright Act 1994" - http://www.med.govt.nz/buslt/digital/ -- Dylan Reeve - dylanat_private "Um, yeah."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jul 26 2001 - 14:56:37 PDT