Comments on: A New Year’s Copyright Puzzler

By: miahawk

miahawk — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:31:55 +0000

kapil, cost of copying DVDs includes cost of labor and materials, as you would have to pay someone to do it if you weren’t doing it yourself. you should be ok building in an acceptable hourly rate for the time you spend copying, marketing and distributing, unless MIT OCW expects you to do it all with volunteers. did you ask them what they consider “profit”?

By: » OLDaily por Stephen Downes, Enero 1, 2009 TIC, E/A, PER…:

» OLDaily por Stephen Downes, Enero 1, 2009 TIC, E/A, PER…: — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:53:56 +0000

[...] en CC-NC. David Wiley, iterating toward openness (iterando hacia lo abierto), January 1, 2009 [enlace] [etiquetas: contenidos [...]

By: » OLDaily por Stephen Downes, 1 de enero de 2009 ticat informa:

» OLDaily por Stephen Downes, 1 de enero de 2009 ticat informa: — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:31:58 +0000

[...] en CC-NC. David Wiley, iterating toward openness (iterando hacia lo abierto), January 1, 2009 [enlace] [etiquetas: contenidos [...]

By: kapil

kapil — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:36:10 +0000

I have been trying to find out solution of this problem for last one year. I am trying to promote open educational content in India(already burnt lot of my personal money for promotional activities). There are many places in India where people don’t have access to Internet. So I approach MIT OCW(to start with) and they allowed me copy the content in DVDs with some conditions :

1. You are welcome to recover nominal actual costs for copying DVDs.

2. Only under 1000 copies of CDs are allowed.

3. Allowed only for Educational Purpose.

4. There should be no profit motive.

5. Intended use of the copies is in compliance with all license terms.

6. People must be informed that the materials are freely available on the OCW web site and that their purchase of copied materials is optional.

There are lot of people in developing countries who buy CDs for Linux as they can’t download it. There are people who sell it for profit.

Now, If I am spending a lot of time and energy in collecting content and organizing it around a particular course(catered to local syllabus) in a DVD apart from burning and sharing it with others, can’t I make little profit for my effort ? I am not a rich guy, I have just passed out of college couple of years back and I need money to sustain myself and my family. So If I can’t do it for some profit , I am waiting for a person who can donate money and help me spread this world class lectures in India to million of students who don’t have access to Internet.

Also, we are talking about these projects on global scale. I have to check Indian version of first sale doctrine.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 02:35:08 +0000

“To take your example even further, why not sell something even more intangible: a *link* to the original? There’s nothing in CC-NC that would prevent that.”

I think selling links is reasonable, so long as providing the link constitutes a “service” beyond the CC’ed “goods.” Isn’t that part of what databases like Lexus-Nexus do? sell *access* to pointers to publicly available content?

I CC’ed By-NC-SA my dissertation (shh. Don’t tell the library.), but that doesn’t mean that Proquest has to abide by those terms because they’re not selling my work. They’re selling a link to it.

By: Ben Shoemate

Ben Shoemate — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:02:23 +0000

So what if you download the CC By-NC-SA content 1000 times and sold each of those 1000 copies? still ok?

By: dvdfanatic

dvdfanatic — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:03:39 +0000

i think that since the internet has become so prevalent, the laws should be changed. large companies expect resellers to sell their items and then prosecute them for copyright or intelectual rights?? whats with that. we are all grown up and people know that to sell a gucci bag, you need to use a gucci picture..lol

By: Lynn Taylor

Lynn Taylor — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 06:55:00 +0000

My official Wyoming State Quarter says First Sale doctrine wins. Hooray for the guy on the bucking bronco!

By: Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:46:30 +0000

I’m inclined to agree with Sherman Dorn; the doctrine only applies to individual, original, copies. It would be very difficult to make a commercial enterprise out of such a practice without making copies.

To take your example even further, why not sell something even more intangible: a *link* to the original? There’s nothing in CC-NC that would prevent that.

Despite the occasional effort by publishers to, say, clamp own on the used book market, a copyright is limited to the right to *copy*. And therefore, the CC-NC condition can apply only to commercial copying.

Other uses – commercial or otherwise – are not impacted by the NC clause. Which includes commercial air dealing, right of first sale, reference and citation, and whatever other non-copying behaviours inventive commercial enterprises can think of.

By: Sherman Dorn

Sherman Dorn — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:09:35 +0000

It’s an interest legal lacuna, but I don’t think it’s a practical problem, since the First Sale doctrine only applies to individual copies. I suspect you could make a plausible argument that it really has to be the original downloaded file that’s sold, not a copy; else you could buy a book, make a photocopy, and then sell the photocopy while keeping the original book. So the import MAY be that you can sell an electronic copy but only if you are giving up YOUR copy (or copies). That would allow you to sell the hard drive with the file, for example, but not make a DVD and sell it.

But even if I’m wrong, I think the worst case is that you could sell a single DVD copy on eBay, which would be pretty silly since everyone could download the file for free.

In a practical sense, I think that the CC NC license limits the ability of commercial enterprises from falsely claiming or implying that they are selling something that they have exclusive rights to. To distribute something commercially, they’d have to go to the rights-holder and get permission to falsely claim or imply… and my guess is that in most instances, the rights-holder will say, “Sure, go sell this and give me money, but you need to put the link in there that will show the user that they can get more for free.”