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EMRZ

Sorry if i don't understand this totally, but why is scraping for pdf and ppt/pptx files and mirroring them illegal?

If you can reach that files just scraping it means they are somehow open to public access.

No joke, i am genuinely asking.

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Just because they're published on the internet doesn't mean you can rehost them - that's copyright infringement.

(The Internet Archive is very careful to skirt the edge of what's permissible and what they can get away with in this regard)

So copyright infringement of this form may or may not be immoral depending on who you ask. And may even be legal depending on where you live

People are selfish and wish to capitalize on the viral nature of reuse. So they make up "legal rights" to protect their ability to out gain you even after they're long dead.

Are you arguing against intellectual property?

Seems so

I get the impression ATM that copyright infringement is legal as long as nobody complains. When one person complains or files a DMCA takedown notice, no problem, it gets taken down. It needs to be a big company's documents - like Elsevier or (in the Bittorrent era) music publishers - before a major legal action is undertaken to take a site offline.

TL;DR it's not a crime if nobody complains. Now that someone complained though, things might end up badly for the owner.

Following the same logic killing someone would also be legal as long as "nobody complains".

Not really.

Around here, some crimes and all civil matters require a complaint but other crimes, such as murder, can be prosecuted without one, on the state's own behalf.

The FBI investigates IP theft and counterfeiting. It's not clear to me whether they require a complaint before taking action.

And I'm wrong.

Prosecutors can press charges on any case, but customarily don't if the victim isn't willing to cooperate.

In most places it's not part of criminal law but a civil matter, although the copyright industry has taken steps to change that under the guise of "counterfeiting".

It is illegal but you may escape consequences if no one complains.

> I get the impression ATM that copyright infringement is legal as long as nobody complains.

Copyright infringement is never legal. Yes, it's often not enforced until someone complains, but there is a difference between enforcement and legality.

> TL;DR it's not a crime if nobody complains.

It is a crime even if nobody complains, you're just not getting caught or reprimanded. It is possible to hurt someone without getting caught. That doesn't make it okay.

Doesn't the owner first have to claim copy rights on the content for it to be illegal?

For it to be enforced someone has to step forward and claim infringement, but there's no formal requirement for copyright registration any more.

Then several infringement cases have to be opened, in each country according to its specific copyright laws. This may drown the author in costs and time spent to fight these claims that he/she may be discouraged and shut the business down. However this orchestrated "attack" would require coordination from the accusing parties. Further the complexity of such cases requires highly educated lawyers educated in law in cyberspace which means that they are expensive. That is why copyright laws cannot be solved easily in a decentralized way, if they are deemed to be a problem of course. I would claim even that there is no economic feasibility in such infringement claims i.e. there's no money to be made in them directly (acquired from the infringing party) and since the documents are public already, they hold implicitly no monetary value, thus even indirectly there is no money to be made there.

Nope, copyrights are automatic in the US and EU and for any countries that adopt the Berne convention. It’s illegal to copy and redistribute something you don’t have explicit license for.

Example: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#register

Scraping, mostly no. Using them to make profit: yes. Since you then violate the copyright of the author as the original action was solely to make it public (assuming no profit was intended).

edit: Rehosting is not allowed as far as I know in Dutch law if you are attempting to make profit of it by not requesting it from the original owner. Rehosting it and not taking advantage and linking to the original article is allowed as far as I know. But maybe ask your lawyer for info if you really want to know.

NAL but I'd say the profit is not the problem. Rehosting it (also without credit) is.

Huh? IANAL, but that doesn't correspond to my understanding of copyright laws.

If a file is available through non-auth http it’s unclear what the copyright is. I think it depends on the particular item whether copyright was violated.

Making a file public without restriction doesn’t mean another can’t make profit (my ISP makes a profit by transmitting the file to me; gmail makes profit when I email the file to me; google makes a profit when they cache the file; archive makes a profit when they archive a file; etc etc).

I think if this were non-public docs then the case is clearer. But by releasing a document publicly with unlimited access via URL the author explicitly allows unlimited distribution (and due to the nature of tcp/ip redistribution). If an author wants to restrict distribution then they should restrict distribution using available protocols.

Since the article contained some private Dutch governmental documents, I think you are correct to state the last case (some non-public). Though if the are public, reselling them (or making profit as a side business) without referring to the original document is problematic at best, illegal at worst. There are plenty of sites who reference or even quote published documents from the overheid.nl (goverment) websites and make profit from them, but not by copying them without reference. Though they all serve some legitimate purpose and you can actually download them instead of having to click though quizzes and other annoying things in the hope you will click one advertisement.

This is a common copyright fallacy. So common that Brad Templeton was combatting it 20 years ago. Publication does not waive copyright.

* https://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

> If a file is available through non-auth http it’s unclear what the copyright is.

Protocol has nothing to do with copyright. “Non-auth http” doesn't suddenly make copyright murky.

> But by releasing a document publicly with unlimited access via URL the author explicitly allows unlimited distribution (and due to the nature of tcp/ip redistribution).

There is an implicit license to exactly the redistribution necessary to effect access by URL, sure, but this is not “unlimited distribution”.

Republishing is, particularly, not what is licensed.

There is no implicit licence. This is an oft-circulated but fallacious rationalization made by computer people that is not in line with the law.

The law does not recognize any such thing, and until the turn of the 21st century this was a recognized hole. Technically, the World Wide Web (and indeed other systems from FidoNet to SMTP) was a violation of many countries' copyright laws. Legislators fixed the hole, but not by introducing the idea of implicit licencing.

The EU introduced provisions in 2001, by way of a Directive, that the making of temporary transient copies for the likes of HTTP and other network transmission mechanisms to work was explicitly not copyright violation in the first place. This became Netherlands law in 2004, and U.K. law in 2003. Neither the Directive nor the implementing Acts and Instruments talk about licensing. It is simply not a violation of copyright by definition.

* https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32...

* https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/RIDA2005_206.pdf

* http://wetten.overheid.nl/jci1.3:c:BWBR0001886&hoofdstuk=I&p...

* https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2498/regulation/8/m...

* https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2498/note/made

> There is no implicit license. This is an oft-circulated but fallacious rationalization

There is implicit copyright, I assume that’s what the parent comment was referring to. In the US, it is automatically illegal to copy something and redistribute it under copyright law [1]. The same is true in the EU [2]. While copyrights are not licenses, the parent comment is correct in the sense that one does not have a license to distribute copied content until one is granted that license explicitly by the copyright holder.

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#register

https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/docum...

You and xe were both quite clearly talking about implicit licences.

> There is no implicit licence. This is an oft-circulated but fallacious rationalization made by computer people that is not in line with the law.

> The law does not recognize any such thing

Okay, so you said it three times, but it doesn't make it true. Implied license is a real legal doctrine in both the general law of licenses and copyright in particular, at least in the US.

See, just for a random case incorporating this doctrine, Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen, 908 F.2d 555, 9th. Cir. (1990) https://m.openjurist.org/908/f2d/555/effects-associates-inc-...

The law concerned, in this case of a (purportedly) Russian citizen using EU-located servers to serve WWW pages to people in the EU, is not U.S. law. You have made this further error twice, now.

> If a file is available through non-auth http it’s unclear what the copyright is.

No. Everything that is copyrightable is either under copyright or the copyright has expired. There are no copyrightable works that are neither. What you can do with a file on "non-auth HTTP" depends on what rights the copyright holder grants you. Making it available implies you are allowed to read it. Doesn't imply you're allowed to copy it, print it, sell it, make money with it, ...

If you don't have the author's or publisher's permission to republish, you're in breach. That's the entirety of practical crux of copyright law.

In practice, in some cases the authors' intent is for others to republish, especially on the web. So they deliberately don't pursue damages―but they still have the right to do so, and users are still not entitled to anything unless there's a specific broad license. Republishing files en masse stretches this unspoken agreement.

People keep grossly misinterpreting copyright law, because they got used to the share culture on the web. "Fair use" is especially invoked left and right where it doesn't apply. "Public access" is also not a thing in the law (afaik).

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