Re: copyright fraud?

[Greg Grossmeier <grossmei@umich.edu>]

Thanks to a co-worker, things are a little more clear...

When you go to that Natural Disaster and Exteme Weather 
collection and click on their Terms of Service at the bottom, it 
brings you to the middle of their entire legalese. It starts at 
the Terms of Service and skips the Copyright Notice part. See: 
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/disaster/help.action?topic=terms_of_service

So, in effect, the Copyright Notice part (quoted below) was not 
easily findable (I missed it!); there is no direct link to it 
that I could find.

"Materials available on this website are the property of their 
respective copyright holders. Please see the individualized 
copyright notice that is printed within or appears with each 
document, and read the EBRARY TERMS OF SERVICE for information 
about what you may and may not do with the Materials available on 
this site. All rights not expressly granted herein are reserved 
to the copyright holders."

Everything in the Terms of Service seem to suggest that ebrary 
holds the rights to those works and are restricting their use.

So, they aren't placing a fraudulant copyright notice on the 
work, but instead are limiting reuse of public domain materials 
by contract (their ToS).

Thus, no legal copyfraud, but ethical copyfraud (which, 
fortunately or unfortunately, is perfectly legal).

Thanks to my coworker for the point, I completely missed that 
Copyright Notice piece at the top!

Nevermind the whole paragraph on the first page that starts with: 
"To build this site, we gathered public domain PDF documents from 
government websites..."

I think I was a little quick on the trigger...

Best,

Greg

> <quoting
> name "klausgraf@googlemail.com"
> date "2010-03-24"
> time "17:40:27 -0400">
>
>> Re. this site:
>>
>> http://site.ebrary.com/lib/disaster/help.action?topic=3Dterms_of_service
>>
>> It would be a good idea to think some seconds why claiming 
>> copyright and re-use restrictions on US government works which 
>> are in the PUBLIC DOMAIN is fraudulent.
>
> I wondered that myself when I first came across that site.
>
> And yes, according to the Copyright Act, making a fraudulant 
> claim of copyright is a finable offense. The hard part is 
> proving fraudulant intent. Full quote from the USC 17 506(c):
>
> "Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article 
> a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such 
> person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, 
> publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any 
> article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to 
> be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500"
>
> Of course, I think it is unbalanced that the fines for 
> fraudulantly claiming rights and ownership over something you 
> do not own is so much less than the the statutory damages 
> brought against an infringement (sharing a work, for instance).
>
> Shameless plug: If you are interested in the topic of 
> "copyfraud" I wrote up an piece a while ago which is available 
> at: http://blog.grossmeier.net/2009/03/19/copyfraud/
>
> Best,
>
> Greg
>
> Greg Grossmeier
> Copyright Specialist
> University of Michigan Library
> http://lib.umich.edu/copyright
> grossmei@umich.edu
>
> Note: The usual disclaimer, these are my views and only my views. Same
> with my personal blog.