Karen Coyle has an excellent blog post about some of the ridiculousness we’ve been getting used to lately in terms of copyright and copyright notices. This includes libraries that say you can’t make a digital copy of a public domain imags that they make available (debatable but still odd-sounding) a copyright notice on a blank book and what the heck is up with the innocuous sounding Computer & Communications Industry Association.
2 thoughts on “Copyright notices, deceptive and otherwise”
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There’s an interesting paper on SSRN by Jason Mazzone on just this topic: Copyfraud. He basically asks why there are such harsh violations for infringing owners’ rights but not similarly harsh ones for owners’ claiming rights they don’t have.
Well, CCIA is on “our side” on this one–as on many extreme-copyright issues. They’re the big consumer electronics and PC companies; excessively tight content restrictions make it tougher to sell hardware. If you note Coyle’s commentary, CCIA is taking legal action against fraudulent copyright notices–and that’s consistent with CCIA’s stance in the past. (I left a comment on Coyle’s post; I’m a little surprised she’s not more familiar with CCIA, which has indeed been around for a very long time.)