hutcheson - 4:07 pm on Jan 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

Kinhunter, the situation you describe in paragraph 1 is a misrepresentation of pre-1970's U.S. law. Today, material doesn't have to be labelled to be protected by copyright, even in the U.S. (This is a retrograde step in the direction of freedom of expression -- under today's law only very rich people with lawyers can KNOW whether they can legally exercise those rights, whereas ordinary folk are pretty well excluded. But that is the current international copyright treaty recognized by most civilized countries, as well as a number of others.)

And "leaving something in a public place" is not at all the same thing as "publishing". Arguably, placing something on a publicly available website IS tantamount to publishing -- and in this case the judge appeared to consider that the plaintiff's copyrights applied just as if he had published his website "any other way."

DRM has nothing, nothing at all to do with copyright issues. You can see that fact most readily by considering things like DVDs. Anyone can make copies of those without being able to USE either the original or the copy! DRM only restricts legal users who wish to use legal copies in their own way -- such as, for instance, play DVDs on their computer. And the infamous DeCSS did not help people copy DVDs -- it merely made it possible for people to play DVDs on Linux computers.

Again, DRM does not ever protect copyrights, and did not grow out of any kind of copyright notice or copyright protection scheme. DRM is nothing but a way of applying additional unconscionable restrictions that are legally unsupported and unsupportable, on people who have a legal right to use the legal copy they have in their legal possession.

As for what actions you have to take to protect your copyrights, I suspect you're confusing copyright law with trademark law (which DOES have a clause much like what you describe.) In fact, the DMCA does not specify any fixed deadline for a takedown notice after you become aware of infringement -- the deadlines to reply or remove, apply to the alleged infringer! And, as a practical issue, you may, for instance, allow Google or the Wayback Machine to cache your website for many years, then suddenly change your mind and for your site to be removed -- and they will comply.