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Comment by consp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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, ...

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