[wplug] copyright issues (was: old PC games?)

[Patrick Wagstrom]

> This nuance of copyright law interests me.  Can you point me to some 
> sites or articles that discuss it a bit more fully?
> 
> I'm not interested in rehashing (with obligatory arguing and flaming) 
> copyright issues again in a list.  But I would like to do some more 
> reading on it for myself, if possible.

A good spot to start is by just reading US Code Title 17, which covers 
copyright.  It's a long slog, but you'll be thankful for it afterward -- 
most of it is written in a pretty straightforward manner.

If you'd like a quick summary of a few of the issues, I suggest looking 
at Brad Templeton's 10 Myths about Copyright Law 
(http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html).  Brad's the chairman of 
the board for the EFF and has been around digital freedom issues for 
years, so he knows his stuff regarding that.

As far as other very relevant copyright cases, Betamax is a very 
important one that it's helpful to review just to make sure you 
understand it.  There's some good stuff in some of the pay online 
databases, but I'm assuming that not anyone has the ability to search 
those.  The EFF has a good archive of the case documents 
(http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/betamax/), although they're obviously 
biased in their direction.

For the foundations of a lot of the copyright law, I highly suggest 
looking at Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the constitution, Queen 
Anne's statute of 1710 which established the British copyright system, 
the Copyright act of 1790, which established the US Copyright regime, 
the 1906 copyright hearings which established compulsory licensing of 
music, and finally the Copyright act of 1976.  While the DMCA gets a lot 
of the flack, really the only major hurdle it introduced was the 
inability to break copy protection to get at content.

It's also interesting to look at some of the international copyright 
regime issues.  In particular, the Berne Convention for the Protection 
of Literary and Artistic Works 
(http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html), started 
in 1886, but not ratified by the US until 1989.

I've tried not to point to anything that is overly biased in one way or 
another on the issue.  Wikipedia tends to be pushed toward the 
liberalization side of the issue, but is generally a good source. 
Another interesting thing to look at would be Congressman Doyle's recent 
comments regarding the ability to make derivative works 
(http://463.blogs.com/the_463/2007/03/perhaps_the_coo.html).  He appears 
to be pretty knowledgable about the issue, even if he does take a 
seemingly view by his support of mechanisms that disable derivative 
works such as the broadcast flag.

Hope this helps,

--Patrick