wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: My 3 suggestions to improve WWP presentations, easy to impliment?
Jeffrey Engel 2005-Oct-29 14:16:00
Carl von Einem said:
> I don't think copying for private use is stealing. When someone tries
> to
> earn money with that: yes.
>
This isn't to take sides with anybody in this discussion, but I'd like
to clarify something about copyright.
Copyright, at it's most basic purpose, is to protect the owner/creator
from lost value.... **whatever** that value may be in **his** mind.
It is an urban myth that you aren't violating copyright if you pass it
around among your friends but don't make money on it. Copyright isn't
about you. It's about the person who has the **right to copy**. The
owner determines what are the rules because he has the **right to
copy**.
The reason the whole "I'm not violating copyright because I'm not
making money by passing it around" is a myth is because if you pass it
around your friends, your friends might not know who made it. And that
violates copyright if the owner says so.
Let's pretend Edward Fink charges $100 per VR download. If these panos
had monetary value, then your action of passing it around to your
friends for no monetary value would mean that you were stealing sales
AWAY from the owner... your friends might have BOUGHT the pano. But you
GAVE them the pano, so now they won't buy it. In order for your friends
to view the pano, per Edward's copyright, they would have had to pay
for it. But now you're passing it around for free. So you actually have
aided in reducing Edward's sales. And now Edward is angry. ;)
Obviously this is a hypothetical. However the formula works at ANY
level. Replace "sales" and "money" in the paragraph above with
"recognition" and it's all the same. Edward loses recognition because
you have distributed the file with no recognition. And that's Edward's
concern with his copyrighted product. He finds value in that
recognition and is trying to retain it, but feels threatened by all the
copying and downloading.
Now, on the flip side, one could make the argument that he then should
put his copyright information IN the pano itself, since he should
recognize that the Internet's been set up, from the very beginning, to
be conducive to the spreading of information freely and unobstructively
(is that a word???). And I think Carl von Einem made that argument as
well.
There is always legality and then there is reality.
Legally, Edward Fink has a perfectly sound concern. But realistically,
it may be in his best interest to embed that information in the pano
itself, unless he wants to surround the pano with something that
automatically hyperlinks the viewer to his site. I think there's a way
to even do that in Quicktime itself.