At 6:34 PM -0500 1/10/01, David Honig wrote:
On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 12:22:10PM -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
You are if you take it knowingly (can you take something unknowingly?) and especially if with the intent to defraud the copyright holder of their rights.
Interestingly, copyright and patent differ on 'unknowingly taking'. If (as was recently mentioned) someone dupes some content and gives you a copy, you are not responsible -the copier was violating copyright, not you. The copier could 'unknowingly take' by simply mistaking the content for public domain.
But patents are different. If sell you a chip, and you build a board with it, and Joe build a system with your board, and that chip turns out to be infringing a patent, my chip, your board, Joe's system, everything that uses the infringing work is legal toast. (And could be stopped at the border if imported, which happened to an American FPGA vendor who uses TSMC.) This is a major practical problem e.g., in the selling of 'cores'.
So anyway, its definately possible to 'unknowingly take' IP.
As this isn't the Cyberia-L list, thankfully, I won't try to dig up legal cites (even those accessible with Google).. Item: There _have_ been cases where copyrighted material resulted in "infringing works" becoming, in your words, "toast." For example, cases where entire runs of about-to-be-distributed or still-on-bookseller's-shelves books were recalled because the books contained the IP of others. Item: Even more often reported are the cases where videos are seized because of copyright violations. The fact that the "recipient" of the material didn't "know" the violations had occurred does not let him off the hook. A video distributor with 10,000 bootleg copies of "The Matrix" in his warehouses is not off the hook even if he didn't "know" the videos were pirated. If he really didn't know, he probably won't face prosecution, but he definitely faces the "toast" situation with regard to having the videos seized. Item: In many ways, the case with _patent_ violations is actually _looser_. For example, consider the case of the Kodak instant photography system. Courts found that the Kodak product violated Polaroid's patents. Kodak withdrew the product line and offered compensation to those who bought the Kodak system. Did stores with inventories of the Kodak camera face seizure of their infringing inventory in the same way that stores with inventories of bootleg copies of a video face seizure? No. Nor were those who had purchased the Kodak system told that they were in possession of stolen property. I'm not disputing the general tenor of your comments about copyright vs. patent law, just noting some interesting examples where the opposite seems to apply, where violations of copyright law face stronger sanctions than violators of patent law do. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns