Originally Posted by
kirchh
Originally Posted by
dneal
Nobody (except the public) owned the documents. The outrage is ridiculous, and sounds like sour grapes because it is more difficult to profit from something that didn't belong to anyone in the first place.
I want to emphasize the error here. Nobody -- including the public -- owned the
copyright to the works. The reproductions were owned by the creator (or party who arranged for their creation, etc.).
If you photocopy a copy of a public-domain Parker catalog, do you believe that you do not own that photocopy (not the copyright, just the actual photocopy), and that furthermore you must provide any member of the public access to it for free?
--Daniel
David answered your question, but I'll make the issue simple:
PCA has a library of scanned catalogs that were printed by others.
PCA thinks they have control or ownership of these scans (this is the first debatable point).
Similar scans of these catalogs are also available at archive.org.
PCA thinks these documents are copies of their documents (debatable, but probable and I'll even concede that they did come from PCA for the sake of the argument).
PCA thinks it is illegal for these documents to have been uploaded to archive.org (I think this is a point you are making, but we can toss it out if you're not).
PCA thinks it is unethical for someone else to upload their documents for free distribution to archive.org (the second debatable point).
PCA thinks it will lose revenue because of these documents being on archive.org (debatable, but I'll concede this point as well).
For the first point, I do not agree. I sympathize. It runs down many avenues on where the "originals" that were scanned came from, but the bottom line is that the information is owned by the public and not PCA.
For the second debatable point, I again sympathize. I do not agree. Public information is made available to the public. There is nothing unethical about that. It can't have been stolen, because that implies that PCA had ownership. They didn't. PCA was selling convenience, not the information itself.
Bookmarks