please review 'application/pdf'

[ben at morrow.me.uk]

At  5pm on 24/10/03 you (Simon Josefsson) wrote:
>
> In some jurisdiction, simply _accessing_ a document does not violate
> anyone's copyright.  To violate a copyright require more than just
> accessing a document.
> 
> Furthermore, PDF files may contain uncopyrighted material, or might
> not have a clear author.
> 
> I have to agree that it is inappropriate for a technical document to
> make these legal statements.  If the text should remain at all, I
> believe it would make sense to relax the wording somewhat.  Right now
> the text make assertions that cannot be tested for technical
> interoperability.
> 
> Legal requirements change over time, and the interpretation and
> enforcement of such requirements should be left to lawyers or the
> proper authorities.

Of course. It is clear (at least to me) that the intention of the
statement is that the (machine-readable) access-permission fields in a
PDF file are to be considered legally equivalent to a formal statement
of copyright and appropriate licensing terms. The further legal
implications of that, as regards rights to access the material etc.,
are not (and should not be) dealt with by the ID: they are left to the
proper authorities. Maybe it should be recast to make this clear.

Of course, in any actual dispute, I would have thought it quite within
the bounds of possibility for lawyers and judges to ignore this ID:
thus, people concerned about their copyrights would do well to put a
full statement in natural language as well. :)

Ben