thank you for explaining that more fully- I didn’t realize they ruled based on case law already on the books- It looks like perhaps the writers were screwed over by the writers guild by forcing all writers to participate in the action/suit-
But i don’t understand how existing case law made it ok to post full works online in the first place- against the wishes of the authors if they should object-
If this is truly the case, then websites really have no right objecting to people copying and pasting whole articles online
[[The 2013 decision found that the scanning of books (provided for that purpose by libraries) was not a violation of copyright, owing to its being “transformative” — in a technical sense. The books were not simply being resold or the like,]]
From the case article:
One could say that copying website material and posting elsewhere is ‘transformative’ - in a technical sense’ it would seem- if a link is provided to the original website, then one could say it is not ‘providing a substitute for the original work’ technically speaking (however, obviously, copying and pasting another’s work, and not giving credit, or claiming it as one’s own would violate the copyrite, and be guilty of plagiarism)
Meh- My not being a lawyer it’s hard to comment not knowing all the facts- It just seemed odd that case law would allow something like that- I understand that works no longer protected under copyrite could technically be posted (although I think there’s even some guidelines/restrictions htere too if I’m not mistaken) but actual copyrite material seems a bit odd-
They never published full works of any material covered by copyright. They did and do publish excerpts, which every court has said is well within fair use.
Full text works where the copyright has expired (and the formerly protected work became publicly owned) has been published, and will continue to be published by a wide variety of publishers.
If this is truly the case, then websites really have no right objecting to people copying and pasting whole articles online
Since those articles are protected by copyright for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years, they can not be reproduced for commercial purposes. The Internet Wayback machine, on archive.org, is a legal case waiting to happen as they do republish entire articles without excerpting - their best defense is they don't monetize it. But they are without a doubt the largest publisher of copyrighted works in the world (followed by Google through page caching.)
As for transformative - going from print to digital can be seen as a derivative work as it has transformed it into a new media. But that doesn't work for commercial use of publishing the entire text. (Lexus-Nexus pays quite a bit for the rights to republish full text work.) Scanning it and placing it into a referential database is transformative and of course the courts approved it.