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That Copyright Problem!Dateline: 18th March, 2000 The Les Mis Multilingual Lyrics site has closed. It was always a bit of an oddity - how many people are really interested in seeing the lyrics of Master of the House in Hungarian? - but it was very much in keeping with the spirit of the Web, the feeling that, no matter how esoteric your interest, there's a site somewhere out there for you. But it's gone, and the reason it went is that Cameron Mackintosh's company demanded that it be removed, because it was breaching their copyright. As these letters go, it was quite a nice one, emphasising the company's delight in the support of the show's fans but nonetheless insisting on its duty to protect its intellectual property. The Webmaster may well feel aggrieved, for there are thousands of other equally blatant (some, in fact, more blatant) copyright contraventions on the Web, so he may well ask, "Why me?" The answer is, of course, that his infringement of the laws of copyright was noticed, whilst others have been more lucky and escaped detection. The fact is, of course, that there are so many sites out there that detection is really a hit-and-miss affair. Back in early 1997 I mentioned a site which carries the full text of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It's still there, simply because the estate of Samuel Beckett has not come across it. What's the difference? It may be argued that there is a big difference between a site which gives the lyrics of a show in a multitude of languages and one which carries the text of a popular play. After all, no one is going to make any sort of financial gain from looking up the Japanese version of a lyric, but anyone who downloads the Beckett text has already deprived the estate of some income, for otherwise a copy would have been bought, thus bringing in a percentage of the cover price, or borrowed from a library, where Public Lending Right would have ensured some payment, albeit small. No one profits financially from the first, but many could from the second. But in the eyes of the law that does not matter. The lyrics belong to someone and it is as wrong to take them as it is to take someone's car or burgle his house. The law does not require that a thief benefit to make what he does a crime. It is a crime simply because he does it. Theft is either wrong or not: we cannot say that stealing £5 is wrong but stealing 5p is not. Where do you draw the line? Stealing £5 from a millionaire will make no difference to him, whereas stealing the same amount from a pensioner could be the difference between eating properly or not, between having heating on a cold day or sitting shivering in a freezing room. In the same way, even the pensioner might not really notice the theft of 5p, but for a schoolkid it may mean the difference between being able to get a bus home or having to walk, and that could cause anything from mild inconvenience to rape! Theft, then, is theft, regardless of the amount. So breach of copyright is breach of copyright, whether it's the use of a small picture or a whole play, whether the guilty party benefits financially or not. And it's still breach of copyright whether you photocopy a book or scan it, whether you put the copy in a filing cabinet, on a bookshelf - or on the Web. Next page But Isn't the Web Different? Articles Indices:
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