[Sussex] We can screen it! - portable projector

[Geoff Teale]

Mark wrote:
-----------
> What legal right is this?
> 
> AIUI, in England (happy Geoff?), one is entitled to use a DVD 
> only as permitted
> in the terms granted by the copyright holder.
> 
> I am not aware of any blanket legal right to make a backup copy.
> 
> Geoff?

I think you need to be very careful with all of this stuff, and please
remember that copyright producers like to paint the law as being
black-and-white and always in favour of them taking more of your money away.
The license you agree to with most software is written for the US legal
system and (for example) large parts of Microsoft's EULA are not binding
anywhere in the EU (i.e. the right for resale of your license is immutable
in the EU contract law, so you are within the law if you choose to sell on
your license to use Microsoft software, even though this is explicitely
excluded in the EULA).

With regard to the right to backup copyright material:

No license agreement can limit your rights to the life on the media on which
it is supplied because the excludes the right to maintain the material you
have licensed.  The simplest way to express this is that if you buy a poster
no contract can stop you cellotaping up a tear in it, or having it
recoloured after it has faded.  In this manner it could be considered legal
to make a verbatim copy to protect against the loss of your licensed
material.  This would be described as "fair use".   However, this
duplication must be within "reasonable" limits (2000 copies would be
difficult to justify) and access must be limited to the legal entities who
have licensed the material.  Moreover the use for which the backup is
intended must be identical to that which was licensed, so burning a CD
copied from another CD is acceptable, but making a copy on cassette is not.
In most cases the copy may not be in use concurrent to the original.  

The only exceptions to this is where the original vendor will provide
maintenance for your media or provide replacements without charge or where
media .  Software firms often a achieve this by allowing you to purchase
media to use with existing licenses (seperating the media from the rights),
so, for instance, there is no legal difference between installing Windows XP
from a copied disk so long as it is a copy of a disk that you had the right
to use and you have purchased the correct licenses to be able to use it at
all.  However you can link media to certain licenses - you cannot install
material from MSDN disks onto any machine on a "production" network, because
this would be in breech of the terms of the MSDN agreement (which in turn
invalidates _every_ other Microsoft license you have - and they said the GPL
was viral..).

Of course.. none of this directly relates to DVD's because no legislation
and very little precedent has been created explicitly for digital media.
Generally the law applies by common sense (i.e., if a law is obviously
relevant then assume it  _will_ apply if bought to judgment).

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org


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