Important! BOC Lyric Copyrights and the WWW, FTP

[Alun Hughes]

Oh dear, copyright again! The thing about copyright is that although
the law varies from country to country (and that in itself is
interesting in the context of the Internet) basically almost anything
you do is strictly speaking not allowed ...

Lyrics archives will almost always be in breach of copyright unless
the copyright owner's permission has been obtained. But it's not
a hanging offence. The worst that is likely to happen to you is that
you will have to take the lyrics off. If the copyright owner asked you
to do so you would be a bit silly not to. Theoretically (in UK law at
least) your equipment could be confiscated but this in practice would
be extremely unlikely. You are unlikely to have to pay any damages
unless the copyright owner can prove loss, which is improbable.

I don't think that the fact that you had transcribed the lyrics yourself,
possibly inaccurately, would be a defence. In fact, recent UK
copyright legislation introduced the concept of "moral rights" which
you might conceivably be in breach of by "tampering" with the
author's text ...

A more likely source of difficulty than the copyright owner might be
the organisation that owns the server carrying the offending material.
I have responsibility for my institution's Web server and I would have
to require the removal of anything that was in clear breach of
copyright, especially if it were drawn to my attention ...

"Fair dealing" (in UK law at least) is restricted to the purposes of research
or private study. Quotations for the purposes of review are also
allowed. .sig files probably don't fall into either of these categories, but
who's going to sue you?

Copying the text of articles and putting them on a Web server is always
going to be a breach of copyright and is probably the most serious
breach - after all, you are effectively republishing material that someone
else has paid for the rights to publish.

As I compose this long-winded message, this arrives:

>The internet, and particularly WWW pages, has rendered all laws on
>copyright obsolete IMO. For a start no-one has defined publishing
>in this new world. There are people who believe that by creating a

Oh yes they have. Copyright law still exists and case law is being
developed both in the US and UK. Intellectual property rights are
a *big issue* in the Internet environment.

>web page or an e-zine they are publishers, well if that is so then
>copyright laws apply to them. There are others who view ftp sites as
>places in which information can be shared conveniently. I believe
>that BOC-L ftp site and OLGA would come under this heading, no income
>being generated from them.

They are publishers in a legal sense. The fact that no income is generated
is completely immaterial. (Again in a legal sense.)

OK, legal diatribe over. My own views are:

- you should consider whether what you're doing is morally OK (whatever
  your own standards are)

- you might like to consider what the copyright owner might think if he/she/
  it knew what you were doing, and you might like to think of asking
  permission

- consider, who's going to sue?

Alun