Students fight e-vote firm's DMCA claims

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Your logic is somewhat flawed

"Copyright is supposed to protect income potential from the copyrighted material. Therefore it would seem that if there is no intention to publish for profit, copyright infringement would be impossible."

I'm no lawyer, but my understanding of copyright is that it exists in any work you create, be it an e-mail, letter, poem, book, quilt design, computer code, painting, whatever. As long as you can show that it is your work and that you created it, it has copyright by default. If you perform the work as an employee of a company, then the company has the copyright.

Copyright protects a work by not allowing others to claim ownership - hence no one can take your work and sell it without permission since they don't own it. Copyright exists to protect ownership. As the owner, you have the right to determine who gets to "use" the work and so can stop the publication or distribution of the work since this allows others to use it without your permission, virtually "stealing" it. The bottom line is, if I created it, you can't use it without my permission, that's it.

Whether the e-mails have any current value, or whether the students are attempting to profit from them, is irrelevant. The fact that they don't own them and are distributing them in their entirety may very well breach copyright, if not the DMCA.

Parts of copyright material can be legally copied provided you do not copy it in its entirety - say quote a few lines of a play in a review or extracts of documents in an investigative journalism piece. This is where the students may fall down - had they used excerpts of the e-mails within a text, with proper attribution, that would be perfectly reasonable and probably perfectly legal as an expression of free speech. But they didn't.

Posted by: Fred Fredrickson   Posted on: 11/17/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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