Amy Alexander on Sat, 20 May 2000 05:42:04 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Dialectizer closes; a victim of the Corporate Napster Bandwagon? |
On Thu, 18 May 2000, Benjamin Geer wrote: > On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:50:42PM -0400, DLOska@aol.com wrote: > > Does anybody know the specifics to how ordinary translations > > (e.g. an English translation of a Spanish novel, etc.) are > > understood under copyright law? > > It seems to me that copyright notices often say that the work's > copyright covers translation as well as ordinary copying. What are the current laws regarding selective enforcement then? I'm able to do an English to French translation of Bank of America's web page using Babelfish, so presumably, B of A hasn't threatened litigation against the Babelfish/Altavista people to prevent them from translating B of A's pages. My understanding about US copyright enforcement is that copyright holders are obligated to go after anyone they know about who is infringing on their copyright, or risk losing it. (Or is that just for trademarks?) If that's right, then it would be difficult to believe that B of A heard about Dialectizer but never heard of Babelfish. Anyone know of a legal reason why enforcement wouldn't apply to both? Seems to me, Dialectizer, which is non-commerical and is a parody, would fall more under "Fair Use" than translation, where Babelfish is simply a translation and is commercial (they sell ads.) -amy # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net