I decided to attend thise talk even though there are two more obviously technically oriented talks going on - I'm curious as to how the legal people see this field. So from their standpoint - the good news is, the subscription model gives people the content they want, when they want it. It's driven new business models, etc.

The bad news? heh - he says Lawyers (he is one). All of the traditional risks of copyright are still around, and fair use really hasn't been hashed out in this area. For that matter, free expression and libel hasn't been hashed out either. The existing rules - those hashed out in the past - still apply (trademark, copyright, libel, etc.).

Copyrights - Good quote - "The law is always struggling to catch up to the technology" - and the problem is not new. Old law is being applied to new situations all the time. Copyright is any original work that is fixed in tangible form. Generally speaking, copyrighted works cannot be used in whole or in part (copied, etc) without permission. This causes problems with the standard rip and paste culture we live in.

Things fall into the public domain after life + 70 years (95 years for an entity). Way back when, copyright was 14 years + a renewable 14 years. It's gone up and up steadily since then. Discovering whether a given work is or is not in the public domain is not always easy to determine. For instance - the book "The Wizard of Oz" is public, but the film by MGM is not. Things get more complex when you cross borders - which law applies? Which treaty obligations? In the US, there's the 1909 act, and then there's the newer regime.

Works of the Federal Government are in the public domain as well, so any publications from there are public (moon photos, for instance). There may be other issues beyond copyright though. There's also data publication that has been contracted out to a private entity, which may make it copyrighted. Take postal stamps - some of them are licensed by the PO, and the PO itself is in a quasi-public state anyway.

Fair Use - the bottom line is, it's complex and the right answer is often no better than "it depends" :/ It's a risky doctrine to rely on if you are trying to make use of copyrighted material. A lot can depend on the potential market value of the copyrighted work. So quoting a book (newspaper, magazine, etc) is fair use - the hard question is where you have taken too much to fall under fair use (quantitative and qualitative). All of this impacts bloggers - not via linking, but when we quote people, the same rules apply to us as apply to any other form of writing. A comment here from Julie Fenster (on the panel) - media players are most interested in whether the use impacts the economic value for the copyright owner.

Don't rely on how big players do it either - the "Perfect Ten" decision hit Google, for instance.

A question from the audience - if you offer full text feeds, are you offering implied consent to republish (BlogLines, etc)? The panel says yes - your control over re-publishing is diminished based on your actions. It does not, however, diminish your copyright protections. Sounds to me like the debate a lot of the attendees need to have on this is based on what Dana VanDen Heuvel wrote this morning. What the panel thinks is going to happen is DRM applied to RSS feeds . Heh - that will go over well.

Another set of questions arise here - given the "implied consent" theory, RSS makes it easier to repurpose content (for instance, scraping a family cartoon and pushing it to a website that the copyright holder wouldn't want it on). To my mind, this is a technical non-issue - you can scrape HTML nearly as easily as you can scrape RSS. The copyright holder still has ownership either way. As the panel points out, given the smallness of many of the violators (or foreign location), it may not matter anyway. To my mind, if you want to derive value for your site, you need to give me a reason to visit it.

Risk Management - the core business you are in matters, and your size matters. For instance, media orgs and large orgs probably already have policies in place (insurance). For small organizations? Insurance companies move much more slowly than technology, and they are not excited about jumping into this kind of thing quickly (an example: protections given early on for P2P plays, before there was law in the area). Right now, you'll end up in the specialty insurance business if you are looking for coverage here.

Question - how does a blogger protect himself (comes to mind based on that WKPA stuff). Not easy to do, given the paucity of loss data on this (i.e., there haven't been many cases). So a great question - what liability is being assumed by anyone republishing content that could be slanderous (Google, BlogLines, etc) - the panel says "none", as they are seen to be in the same position as a book seller (as opposed to the publisher and writer). A manager who acts in an editorial fashion may well run into a problem (techmeme, et. al. ?). That's very gray at present. On the other hand, sites like Slashdot have been around a long time now.