I don’t think it is. There is certainly no explicit contract, which makes any conditions unenforcable, which makes them equivalent to non-existent.
I’m sure the Gideons would prefer that people did not throw them away, but at the end of the day, they have no legal say over it.
The guy did specifically tell me that once the Gideons dropped off the books, they had no more legal ownership or control of them. What he wasn’t sure about was whether the hotels had any claim.
Untrue. All sorts of “implicit contracts” exist and are enforceable.
http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/2001-June/000537.html
Typically, these are formed when someone accepts something knowing that the other party expects compensation, but as we have already demonstrated, it is quite possible to form an explicit contract for stuff you distribute for free, and there seems to be nothing whatsoever to prevent an implicit contract along the same lines … it is obvious that the Gideons are not distributing the Bibles for pointless destruction; no-one could reasonably be confused on that score.
Similarly to the above case, the “terms” of such an implicit contract are pretty obvious: you may take a bible for the purpose intended - not to simply throw it out.
A worthy summary!
I know I’m wasting all your time with mere cheerleading, but I’d just like to say that this is a fascinating thread. Well-reasoned, never vicious, arguments from both sides, and I find mysef agreeing with just about everyone…which means I need to give it more thought.
Good luck taking that to court. I don’t think there is ny implicit contract with regrd to Gideon Bibles and no legal standing for the Gideons to do anything about it anyway.
Of course they don’t want people to trash them, but they accept that as a possible outcome when they choose to make the donation.
If I make a donation to a food drive, I can say that I prefer for the food to be eaten rather than thrown away. I can even say that the people receiving the donations understand that implication. That doesn’t mean there’s any legal contract.
I don’t think the restaurant analogy is really very applicable. There is no normal expectation of compensation for receiving Gideon Bibles.
To DtC’s excellent argument, I’d like to add that no contract is created in this situation because there is no consideration. The person taking the Bible–whether to read in the hotel room, read backwards for a Satanic ritual, or shoot holes in with his shotgun – is not giving anything to the Gideons. The Gideons are making a gift, and once they surrender their title to the Bibles can no longer do anything to prevent anyone from using it however they wish.
What “consideration” exists for downloading free software? Yet that is subject to apparently enforcable licensing rights.
Actually, should a bible-throwing-out case came to court, I’d be amazed if the thrower-out won on these grounds.
There is no expectation for compensation in any of the freeware agreements noted above. How do you explain their existence? Are they simply meaningless verbiage?
Social convention is a useful guide here - and the convention is, as well understood, that you not take the thing just to destroy it.
The software thing isn’t understood as a donation. My food bank analogy is better.
All you have is “social convention,” which is pretty toothless.
All you have is “understood as a donation”, which is likewise a claim based on convention.
Way I see it is this: assume you are totally unfamiliar with the concept of hotels. You understand that you pay and get the use of a room, but not what your rights are in respect to the various objects that come with the room - the towels, the bed, the lamp, the soap, the ashtray. In one drawer there is a book as well - a Gideon Bible. What would be the reasonable thing to do?
Probably ask the hotel manager. What is he or she likely to say?
Most likely ‘going by social convention’, this person would explain if asked that the towels may be used but not taken or destroyed, the bed may be slept in, the lamps may be used but not taken, the soap may be consumed but not pointlessly destroyed, and the Bible may be taken if you want to read it - but not pointlessly destroyed.
When you sign in to rent a room you are agreeing to all sorts of implicit if not explicit contractual terms, dealing with how you are to behave in a hotel room. I usually do not remember signing a written agreement containing particular detailed terms, but nonetheless I fully understand - again, through “convention” - that I am not to (say) smear feces on the ceiling, or flush fifty rolls of toilet paper down the toilet for fun – even though these things (toilets and paper) are left for “my use”, it is a “use” subject to a term of reasonableness as established by social convention and well understood by most people. Nor am I to just destroy the bible, though I am free to take it to read if I want.
The Bibles are not hotel property. There’s no way you can finesse this so that something all parties agree is free for the guests to take is not free for them to throw away after they take it.
I don’t need to “finesse” anything.
You have to either agree that it’s free to take or not free to take. If you accept that the Bibles are free for the guests to take (and it’s been confirmed both hotel workers and the Gideons that such is the case), then you have to agree that they are free to do what they want with them after they take them. It’s not comparable to freware because that’s a use of intellecrual property. The Bibles are only physical objects. The freeware analogy would be more akin to copying something to a disc and then breaking the disc.
I don’t have to agree with any of that. As I’ve said before, lots of things are free to take, and yet not free to wantonly destroy - in fact, that goes for every other consumable in the room, such as soap, toilet paper and the like.
The distinction you make between software and physical objects doesn’t exist. See my previous link:
[Emphasis added]
There is no reason the license could not apply to a Gideon Bible. Is it not a “texual work” whose “purpose is instruction or reference”?
If the argument is that, to paraphrase, ‘a free physical work such as a bible cannot be given free without restrictions to the end user’, that is quite clearly not the case - unless the good folks who drafted this license are wasting their time.
Actually, you’re in the wrong here–licenses such as this and the freeware stuff you discussed earlier apply to the text but not the physical media in which the text is embedded–the Gnu Free Documentation License can force me (legally) to include the invariant texts when I copy or modify the text of the work, but it cannot legally compel or prevent me from doing anything physical to a book published under said license.
I disagree. From the above-noted agreement I linked to:
How is “lending copies” and “publicly displaying copies” not “anything physical” with a book published under license?
Logically, if they can give permission for “lending” and “publicly displaying”, they can refuse it.
I’m trying to come up with some explaination as to why there should be a bright-line distinction between (say) giving or witholding permission to display a text, giving or witholding permission to lend a text, and giving or witholding permission to destroy a text - such that you can legally compel the former in respect of a physical copy of a book but cannot legally compel the latter.
Display and lending both (in theory) fall under copyright law and have nothing to do with the physical copy of the item in question. (many copyright holders are attempting to make lending something that requires licensing, which is why the GFDL explicitly allows it in anticipation of future regulation) Almost no copyrighted works are licensed for public performance (aka “display” in this context) but again, this right applies to the content and not the media – the MPAA might well sue you for playing your VHS copy of Robin Hood in a stadium without paying performance rights, but they can’t sue you for displaying the actual VHS tape media.
That is, both the “lending” and “public display” rights are STILL tied to the text itself and not the media upon which the text is printed.
How can a book give a “public performance”? This licence expressly applies to books, remember. It is not an item of media that is suited to the sort of “display” you suggest. The only way to “display” a book is to physically handle the actual object, so the distinction you make - between playing a VHS and looking at the actual VHS tape media - does not exist.
Whether or not this agreement falls entirely under copyright law is not the point; clearly you are correct in that the intent is mainly dealing with copyright. This does not mean that the agreement cannot by nature include conditions concerning physically dealing with the item in question. Clearly in some cases it can, as certain acts - i.e., lending, displaying - are physical acts dealing with the object in qestion.
Is your assertion that such agreements must only relate to specific copyright rights, whether such rights actually exist or are merely anticipated? If so, why?
So far, aside from bald assertion, I have seen noting to suggest that one cannot craft conditions detailing restrictions on other physical acts dealing with the object if one so wished.
Indeed, “destruction of a work” is not a concept unknown to copyright law. So-called “moral rights” deal with the physical object of a copyright work, not merely the information content thereof, and in some cases expressly prevent the unauthorized destruction of a work:
http://www.copyright.gov/reports/exsum.html
Now, clearly this applies to original artistic works and not bibles per se, but it does indicate that the distinction you seek to make- that “copyright law” has “nothing to do with the physical copy of the item in question” – is not 100% correct. In some cases, copyright law does have to do with the “physical object in question” and there is no ‘bright line’ distinction between the two.
Hmm, every expert opinion I’ve ever heard of the GFDL (I’m an IT guy, I ask IP lawyers about this kind of stuff admittedly) is that “many of the clauses are Richard Stallman being paranoid about book licenses” and “many of the clauses are only legally applicable in the current legal climate in the case of electronic/software texts and not necessarily for physical books.”
I’d call a reading of a book a “public display or performance”–so a author could likely sue you for a book reading, but not for having the book sitting on a pedestal somewhere.
Basically, I’ve never heard of a law or license agreement, pertaining to copyright, that prevents or punishes the destruction of mass-produced works. We’d have to get an IP law doper in here for any better than that. The limit of my knowledge, as imparted to me by an IP lawyer I was working for in 2005-2006, is as follows:
Even in the latter case, it’s perfectly legal for me to sell you a software disc, just not necessarily the right to use it–and even that is fundamentally tied up in the fact that software, last case law I’d heard, was held to be “copied” in the act of using it.
I’m sorry I don’t have any further cites than this, but it’s going to be hard to convince me otherwise–my know-how is pretty much solely based on working indirectly with IP law as part of my living.