can you take something unknowingly? (was Re: IP, forwarded

[Tim May]

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 at 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