Anthony wrote:
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Unless the license is withdrawn almost immediately, it would likely be impossible to enforce the withdrawal.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