"Links to copyrighted material" Topic

Question.

A poster provides a direct link in a forum post to a a publication that has been made available as a PDF. The PDF has not (apparently) been produced by the original publisher, and shows that the item is copyrighted by the original publisher.

A poster provides a link in a forum post to a webpage that contains a link to a publication that has been made available as a PDF. The PDF has not (apparently) been produced by the original publisher, and shows that the item is copyrighted by the original publisher.

Are one, both, or neither of these posts in breach of TMP rules?

Gary

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a lawyer and I don't own TMP.

Let's assume the copyright is still in force. It hasn't expired without renewal or been released into the public domain (or its equivalent) in the appropriate jurisdiction.

Yes.

Yes.

The first one, where you deliberately link directly to a specific copyrighted file would be a violation. It shows specific intent.

The second one would be in breach of the rules, but may not be a violation, depending on where in the page the PDF was, how prominent, etc. There's a whole spectrum of intent in that case.

F'r'ex, if the page had the title in bold, flashing red letters "ARCHIVE OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL! SCREW THE PUBLISHERS!", it's pretty easy to surmise that you knew or should have known the page would link to such material.

If you linked to a page that had been updated a dozen times since you linked to it and one of the additions was some material with a couple dozen links, one of which, unlabeled as such was a link to copyrighted material, then it's pretty easy to surmise you didn't have intent.

Of course, those are two reductio ad absurdum cases, for the purpose of illustrating that there is indeed a broad spectrum of cases which may not be as easy to evaluate.

One that is really hard to tell is the 'Academia.edu' site. Lots (10's of thousands)of .pdf publications, but just the publication, no information about copyright releases or such.

A lot of $$$erious academic publishers have agreements with their authors that the authors can share copies of their articles after a few years have passed, while still maintaining the publisher's copyright of the article, but this is generally not made public.

This can also apply to Universities and other Government funded services where PhD thesies and excavation reports are made available online to read but are still subject to copyright.

Pretty sure the OP isn't talking about academic research papers.