>> What's a "tangible medium"?
According to copyright law, the method of "fixation" of the work is unlimited. Works that are copied and stored on hard drives, servers, floppy disks, compact disks, or other digital formats are afforded the same protection as a book, a photograph, or an audio recording. Transmission of data over the Internet, however, raises some important legal issues.
Example:
In MAI Systems Corporation v. Peak Computer (1993), the 9th Circuit court ruled that loading a software program onto the random access memory (RAM) of another machine constitutes a "copy" under copyright law--even though that copy may only last a few minutes. This has raised some interesting arguments concerning tangibility and the permanence of copies.
As information is transmitted over the Internet, it is broken down into packets and stored (cached) temporarily, on a number of machines at various stages of the transmission. Do such copies constitute infringement? While the ruling in the example above raises the possibility that they do, copyright legislation presents a different view.
According to the legislative history of the Copyright Act of 1976, "the definition 'fixation' would exclude from the concept purely evanescent or transient reproductions such as those projected briefly on a screen, shown electronically on a television or other cathode ray tube, or captured momentarily in the 'memory' of a computer."
A 1996 statement of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (part of the Clinton administration's Information Infrastructure Task Force) is even clearer in its interpretation of this issue: "Transmission may result in fixation, [but] a work is not fixed by virtue of the transmission alone."
While this appears to address the issue of temporary caching on servers in transmission of the pages, however, it does not address the issue of longer instances of caching on servers and end users' computers discussed in the "Technologies" section.
<<Back