Brian Schott wrote: > I too, am no expert, but wonder if this more liberal > interpretation is correct.
It's an approximation, which is valid in some circumstances, but it is not totally accurate. Copyright law, in and of itself, grants quite a bit of control over the rights to make copies to the person who owns the copyright. This part of the law is strict. (The legal jargon is "irreparable harm" -- a judge can give you a preliminary injunction to stop whatever copying or distributing you are doing, before the case goes to trial, if the issues are clear enough. If you are a business, this can be a very serious economic penalty.) However, almost all court cases involving copyright also involve contract law. Contract law mostly concerns itself with costs and who owes who what. When copyright permission is granted, it's usually granted in the context of a contract, and you can be in violation of the contract -- you might not have lost the right to make copies of someone else's copyrighted material, but you might have to pay more for them than what you have already paid. That said: you don't have to be making a profit to cause an operating loss for someone else. If your activities are causing problems for someone else a loss, you can still be liable for damages under contract law. And so on and so forth, ... there are many other things which might be issues, if the people involved disagree about them. If you don't want to go the expensive route (hiring a lawyer and so on), the best thing to do is: make sure that you have clear permission for whatever copies you make or give away, and if the copyright holder is unhappy with you, try and do everything you can to avoid ever having to deal with that copyright holder or the associated copyrighted material. (And if that's not possible -- if the associated material is that pervasive -- there's probably a good chance it's not copyrightable.) That said, within a specific and relatively unchanging field (such as photography) there are usually a well understood set of standard practices that most people follow. And, for the most part, those are what's important. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
