Author Drops Copyright Case Against Scribd Filter 81
natehoy writes "Apparently, monitoring for copyright violations is not in itself a copyright violation, lawyers for Elaine Scott decided. As a result, they have dropped the lawsuit against Scribd, who was being simultaneously sued for allowing copies of Scott's work to be published, and retaining an unlicensed copy of the work in their filtering software to try and prevent future copyright violations."
What about Child Porn? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about Child Porn? (Score:3, Interesting)
What if you're training filtering applications to automatically discover and block child porn? You'd want to talk to the police first, obviously, but you have a strong legitimate reason in having it there. By you having it for non-nefarious reasons, in order to help stop it, the world would have significantly less of it going around.
US courts have ordered many services to implement filtering systems for copyrighted material. For those to work, they need to know what the copyrighted material to be blocked is. If you rule that copyright filtering systems can't itself have copies of the material, the copyright blocking systems stop working (to some degree or another). This is exactly the sort of situation that falls under fair use. Otherwise the court orders to implement filtering would have to be overturned, and there would be significantly more infringement going on.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if it is getting ridiculous as much as the law itself is just confusing and unclear.
It doesn't need to be, the original laws on the subject were pretty easy to understand, and pretty reasonable. Each time they revise it though it just gets worse and worse.
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers. --Ayn Rand
Re:Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it is certainly on the silly side and the money-grubbing-greedy-bitch side as well. But legally speaking, aren't they correct? Especially if they really were holding an entire copy of the work for their filter?
I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem to me like they actually need to hold a full copy of the work to do their filtering. Can't they just take a random sampling of phrases and search for those, or something else entirely?
Infringed from Orwell's work (Score:1, Interesting)
Infringed from Orwell's work. The story 1984 has that as the central theme, concentrating on the fact that it is partial enforcement that is used to keep people down, NOT merely lots of laws.
After all Randians would NOT like the bit about "don't enforce the laws against the rich and connected". Hence her gutting of 1984's main thread.