
Flagrant breach of copyright by TeacherSoft - MaysonL
http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2011/02/flagrant-breach-of-copyright-by.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BronteCapital+%28Bronte+Capital%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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angusgr
The problem with using an analogy to prove a point is that the analogy is
nearly always a poor fit for the actual situation.

In this case, I think a better (still flawed) analogy would be where
"TeacherSoft" records only everything the students say - so if they're having
a lesson about "Joe the Novelist", TeacherSoft sees some words and snippets of
information from Joe's work, including when the students quote back a sentence
of two, but not all of Joe's work.

This is closer, IMHO, to Bing seeing the URLs of Google's search pages when a
user visits them, and which links the user chooses to click, but not the
search pages themselves.[1] But it's still a poor analogy, IMHO.

[1] If you don't know what precisely Bing gets sent, it appears to be this:
[http://projectgus.com/2011/02/bing-google-finding-some-
facts...](http://projectgus.com/2011/02/bing-google-finding-some-facts/)

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eli
Especially since copyright law has exemptions _specifically_ for teacher's
reading copyrighted works to their class.

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Vivtek
His entire argument seems based on his assertion that Google has copyright to
search results. I think they probably don't, for two reasons: first, there's
no copyright notice on search result pages. Second, a search result is
probably a database under copyright law, and databases (like the phone book)
can't be copyrighted.

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tzs
> first, there's no copyright notice on search result pages

Irrelevant. There is no legal requirement in most countries to put a copyright
notice on a copyrighted work.

> Second, a search result is probably a database under copyright law, and
> databases (like the phone book) can't be copyrighted.

Databases can be copyrighted as compilations.

The typical phone book is not copyrightable because it is insufficiently
creative, not because it is essentially a database.

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waterhouse
Seems that under copyright law, the teachers who set up the recording
equipment in their rooms and then read aloud copyrighted books would be at
fault for creating copies (or at least aiding in the creation of copies) of
copyrighted material. The TeacherSoft company would just be the recipient of
these copies; they might be required to delete them, but the primary party
guilty of copyright infringement here would be the teacher who read it aloud.

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shareme
one problem with the author's premise:

IN the example he gave the copyright infringement occurs because audio
performance is recognized as copyright infringement of a copyright of a text.
And it comes about because that audio performance is replayed to many
individuals.

We do not know yet if a click-stream of copyrighted work is in fact copyright-
able yet..Hence the debate at hand

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greenyoda
Right! Audio performance vs. click-stream is a bad (deliberately misleading?)
analogy. Classic apples vs. oranges.

The idea of a click-stream being copyrightable sounds pretty far-fetched. It's
not something that's actually created by Google or any other entity.

I think this whole affair casts Google in a rather negative light.

