A very interesting Cyber Crime has been reported from Belgium. A Belgian
site named Euregio.net has alleged that some portion of text appearing
in its sub site Internet horoscopes.com has been stolen and reproduced
in invisible form on a site called Women.com. It has therefore filed a
suit for copyright infringement.
The interesting fact of the case is that the reproduced text is said
to appear in white fonts on white bckground and hence is normally
not visible.
Also, Wherever the word "Internet Horoscope appeared in the original
text, it was replaced with the word "EasyScopes".
Secondly, the benefit that Women.com envisages is that it's search engine
rankings based on robotic scanning for relevant text would increase.
Playing a devils advocate, it appears that the so called infringement
is not visible to human eye but to an electronic eye. The infringement
is an adaptation and not complete copying. It is also not clear how the
right of the original author has been infringed?. Has been prevented from
making sales of his product?
Under the circumstances, will law consider this as "Copyright Infringement"?
July 1, 2001
Details
from Eurogio.net
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