On 3/1/2011 11:11 PM, Patrick Ben Koetter wrote:
* Ted Mittelstaedt<t...@ipinc.net>:
On 3/1/2011 11:55 AM, John Levine wrote:
From a legal perspective I will point out that any e-mail you
receive is (at least in the US, but most other countries too)
considered copyrighted by the sender. Under copyright law the
sender has the right to control expiration of content they create,
German law will not work in this case for the same reason it won't for email
disclaimers too. The rationale is that "one-sided agreements rescind a
contract", which is the case if a sender declares e.g. a copyright on a
message
It's actually a lot more complex than that.
For starters, by definition copyright is automatic on any created
content. See the Berne Convention. Germany signed that in 1887.
Application of copyright wouldn't be considered a one-sided agreement.
I suspect your confusing this with the so-called "shrink-wrap licenses"
> or wants "to control expiration of content they create".
>
This is a lot more complicated.
Keep in mind that e-mail is an electronic work and those have
more extensive copyright. This was defined in the 1996
WIPO copyright treaty (that was mainly created to cover electronic
forms of content distribution) that is here:
http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/trtdocs_wo033.html
In particular I will bring up the following section of the
treaty
Article 12
Obligations concerning Rights Management Information
(1) Contracting Parties shall provide adequate and effective legal
remedies against any person knowingly performing any of the following
acts knowing, or with respect to civil remedies having reasonable
grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate or conceal an
infringement of any right covered by this Treaty or the Berne Convention:
(i) to remove or alter any electronic rights management information
without authority
The question is, is an "Expiration:" header part of electronic
rights management? I think it would be very hard to argue that it
is not.
It might have worked back in the days of half-way covenants
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Way_Covenant> ... ;)
If your system was programmed to expire the
mail as a result of the expiration and the content creator knew this
and wanted to take advantage of it by putting in an expiration,
then if you filtered the expiration out or otherwise defeated it,
you would be removing the rights management information.
In the US the 1996 WIPO treaty is implemented by the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (yet another instance where Congress
signed away more of our Constitutional rights) I don't know
about Germany, but the treaty requires signatories to implement
it in their legal framework.
Ted
p@rick
I really think it would be a good idea for people to refrain from
playing Junior Lawyer here.
I know just enough about copyright law to know that this claim is
nonsense.
No, it is not nonsense. Copyright law does allow the content creator
to specify duration of use. If you go view a movie in a movie theater
you buy a ticket for a single viewing, you do not automatically get
to view it multiple times just because you bought a ticket.
Ted
R's,
John
