Jack Campin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | Found this on uk.comp.sys.mac. Good news for Toby's little station... | > A copyright proposal that would have meant the death of the vast | > majority of Internet broadcasters (who would, amongst other things, have | > had to pay between 0.4 and 0.6c per song per listener - retroactively, | > too) in the US has been rejected by the Library of Congress. So Internet | > radio lives, at least to fight another day. ... | I think he means just "Congress", unless the library has acquired some | rather extraordinary powers lately.
Well, yes and no. The Library of Congress does function as the major source of technical advice to Congress on matters dealing with publication and related topics. Most members of Congress (except for those in thrall to the publishing and entertainment industries) will go along with whatever the LoC recommends. So the LoC does have some extraordinary de-facto powers, extra-legal though they may be. This is probably one of the few Forces for Good in the ongoing battle to turn over all "Intellectual Property" to the big corporations. The LoC tends to be a cabal of librarian types who approve of the unwashed masses being allowed (and even encouraged) to read. The LoC is a crucial part of a fun proposal that I and many others have made concerning the attempts to force all data-copying programs to check for copyright. The obvious question is "How can a piece of software determine if a string of bytes is covered by copyright?" The usual first answer is "Look for a copyright notice", but this is incorrect, because under US (and many other countries') law, a document need not contain a copyright notice for copyright to exist. Furthermore, documents often contain invalid copyright notices. The proposed solution to this is "Look it up in the online copyright database." This would be a web site that can be accessed by any piece of software. It would act essentially as a search engine. One of the obvious places to create this database is in the Library of Congress, since they have copies of nearly everything that has been published in the US, and an impressive percentage of the rest of the world's publications. The LoC could get most of the required software from google.com. If US law requires such a check by all software, then obviously Congress will fund such an online database and publish specs for how to access it. We could then program a copyright check by simply (;-) sending the data to the LoC's system, waiting a few milliseconds (;-), and using the reply to determine whether copying is permitted. There is a precedent for this already: School teachers are learning that they can detect student plagiarism from online sources by typing in critical portions of the text to the major search sites. There is software available that packages this capability. Extending it to a general copyright check is merely a Small Matter of Programming. The fun part of this is that it would, in effect, legally require that all copyrighted works be online in the LoC's database (or in a small number of databases in other countries). Other uses of such an online repository are left as an exercise for the reader. (Can you say "Trojan Horse"? I thought you could. ;-) Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
