On 4/14/07, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Unless the license is withdrawn almost
immediately, it would likely be
impossible to enforce the withdrawal. When the mirror sites pick it up
their actions are based on the licence status when they take the
material. If this happens in the time between the granting and the
withdrawal they have a legal copy.
I'm not sure what it means to "have a legal copy", but unless that
mirror site has a license to copy and distribute the work it doesn't
matter when they downloaded that copy.
Does the mirror site have a license, because someone checked a box on
a completely different site saying that they release the work under
the GFDL? Maybe, but it seems this would be something difficult to
convince a judge happened in the first place. Once the copyright
holder has convinced the judge that she has a valid copyright on the
work it's up to the mirror site to show they have a license.
One needs to presume that all of these events will be time-stamped. The
person copying the freely licensed material does so on the basis of what
he sees; he should be under no obligation to periodically review his
source to determine if the situation has changed. The whole viral
purpose of free licences is to strenghthen the right to re-use. If
there is an unbroken chain of licensed and legal copying I don't think
that the original copyright owner can do anything about it. I think
there was a Dutch case on this involving material on YouTube. Generally
I think that it will take quite some time before the courts can bring
any kind of clarity to the issue of free licences, and related matters.
I'm sure they will work just as quickly as they have with other
copyright issues that interest us. ;-)
There does remain the question where the person who uploaded the
material had no right to do so in the first place. Title to that
material continues to be faulty no matter how many people are in the
chain. I do remember reading about a document that was stolen from the
South Carolina archives more than a century before had to go back there
despite a long string of innocent transfers that had taken place since
the theft.
Check marks too can commit a person. Shrink-wrap contracts on software
have been declared valid even though most people have no clue about what
they say. For them the simple fact is that if they don't say yes, the
software won't work.
Ec