The lawyers are winning. Found this over on Night Passage (one of my favorite jazz websites):

 

IMSLP.ORG, the Internet Music Score Library Project has closed down, the founder of the site sadly announces:

On Saturday October 13, 2007, I received a second Cease and Desist letter from Universal Edition. At first I thought this letter would be similar in content to the first Cease and Desist letter I received in August. However, after lengthy discussions with very knowledgeable lawyers and supporters, I became painfully aware of the fact that I, a normal college student, has neither the energy nor the money necessary to deal with this issue in any other way than to agree with the cease and desist, and take down the entire site. I cannot apologize enough to all IMSLP contributors, who have done so much for IMSLP in the last two years.

There were more than 10.000 music scores in the public domain on the site
I must add I am not surprised at all, as I wrote in my previous post I re-started playing piano, and I was so happy to find on IMSLP the whole Mikrokosmos by Bartok, a serie of studies divided in 6 volumes, very popular among piano students. It was an old Sovietic edition with titles in cyrliic, but all the studies were there. The problem is: Bartok died in 1945, 62 years ago, therefore Mikrokosmos does not comply with the rule life+70 years and it's not in the public domain. But this is not the only case. I really hope they open again, but being more careful about published scores.

I've managed to code up some radical changes to the newsfeed system - which I believe will allow us to provide some (very limited) functionality w/r/t reading news without causing any legal issues and without subjecting any site members to liability just for the crime of looking at published newsfeeds. I'll be enabling some of this in the next several days as I get any remaining kinks worked out.

The ability to import articles into the CMS from newsfeeds will not be included. I could of course take the common approach and let y'all take legal responsibility for your own imported content, but that's hardly the kind of thing that a reputable web service would do to its members. Granted that's what some supposedly reputable web services do, but I don't necessarily agree that it's the right thing to do.

You probably should be cautious in any articles you publish to this site that any citations you might provide from elsewhere are free and clear - as we're under a bit of extra legal scrutiny at the moment. It's generally OK to include a snippet of an external article and add comment to it. Don't include the entire source article; and ensure that you have provided additional content/commentary written in your own words.  

 

A look at the website statistics bears out what I already knew from instinct. Traffic is dropping like a rock. What do people want? They want aggregated content. They want the answers to their questions. If you can't provide these, they'll move on to somebody who does; even if this exposes them to a lawsuit. 

In fact, it is only the 1% of people that are writers and contributors who might ever have legal troubles. The vast majority of people (99% or more) are lurkers who never perform a single action to create content.

Last week, over 100,000 page hits a day. Now, 29,000 and falling. There's still a lot of stuff here, but it's hard to compete with celebrity gossip and tech news that are now off limits as content sources.

I'm not complaining about this trend. Those of you who know me also should know better than to think so. I'm just an observer, reporting the facts.

   

A friend (now at Google) responds:

"Mike, obviously I cannot talk about Google internals, but what did we do about content violations at AOL?"

Uhm, nothing.

"Right."

OK, this isn't entirely true. There was that big flap with the EU over their different definition of the age at which a child is subject to parental controls. And then we spent weeks coming up with a solution to the problem of what should happen to group content if a group founder/moderator leaves the online service.

But mostly, content issues weren't our problem as software designers/engineers. The recently passed (at the time) DMCA had a "Safe Harbour" provision - which basically states that a service cannot be liable for infringement by its members if notified of content offenses and takes the offending content down/offline in a reasonable amount of time. Ultimately, this was our solution to any legal issues that might arise. We left it to the legal team to sort out what was or wasn't illegal content, and provided tools to operations staff to actually remove the infringing material.  

 

I've been plunged headon into an absolute chaotic nightmare trying to fully understand the issues of copyright as they apply to newsfeeds.

The short answer is that in terms of the law, copyright wins. You legally cannot show an RSS feed on another website without the express permission of the content owner. There are rare exceptions. The existence of a syndication feed on a website does not grant any rights to the content it contains.

My previous post on why Google can get away with it, is simply because 'they are Google'. According to every document that I've managed to cram in the last few days, they are clearly in violation of copyright law both in letter and spirit. But if you feel infringed, your only choice is a lawsuit - and you will be going up against one of the shrewdest collections of intellectual property lawyers ever assembled. I don't believe anybody has attempted it for Google Reader, although others who have sued Google over copyright infringement have come home with their tail between their legs.

In any other case, posting a newsfeed on another website (in whole or in part) puts you in questionable legal status. Fair use is nebulous. You cannot code fair use into software, and it doesn't offer any protection against getting sued for infringement. It merely gives you some guidelines for a handful of possible defenses.

You can of course view a newsfeed legally on another website if you have the express permission of the copyright owner. But again, this cannot be coded into software, and even then you can't make it available for another person to read - who has not obtained similar permission. This makes Digg, Technorati, Google Reader, and del.icio.us violators in principle, if not in fact. Truncating articles (as some of these sites do) is a defense, it is not a legal standard - and they still could face legal challenges. This is not just limited to RSS/Atom and other syndication formats. It applies to any website content.

If you're a small website operator like me, and you provide any publicly accessible newsfeeds without express permission of the feed owner (or copyright holder), you're technically in violation of U.S. law (this assumes that the U.S. is somehow involved in the content and/or reproduction at issue). Even if members create their own feed sources - but in that case, the members are in violation - not you. You are guilty of facilitating their infringement.

There's only one way out of this mess. Somebody has to sue Google over this issue and lose. Then we'll have some established legal principle. Until then as one writer wrote - 'view a newsfeed, go to jail'. (Though technically copyright law is a civil violation and not a criminal violation).