At 04:54 PM 1/21/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Richard J. Sexton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>My longest standing argument with the manner in which Internic has been so
>grotesquely mismanaged is that the data it holds is public, by virtue of its
>amassing using public funds, and yet, it is impossible to purchase, beg,
>borrow, cajole, or otherwise acquire a copy of it in any form other than to
>harvest it online, one record at a time, through servers which are already
>woefully inadequate to the task.
>
>Now NetSol has decided that a portion of the information is not to be
>publically accessible on a per-record basis. Criminal.
>
>As a taxpayer, I call for an immediate release of the Internic Whois database
>into the public domain and that it be made available to any and all via ftp
>download.
In the article "Government Ownership of Copyrights," 29 U.West L.A. L. Rev
149-164 (1998), I have assailed such claims of copyright ownership. As many
of you may know, NSI similarly claims to "own" .com, .org, .mil, .edu, which
was also acquired as a contractor to NSF and supported from public funds.
(The article was written in response to a policy of some time back in which
the WIPO web page was full of links to data that were only to be accessed
by USPTO personnel. That is no longer the case, meaning that either they
saw the error of their ways or they just quit posting their kind of such data,
period.)
Bill Lovell
__________________________________________________
To receive the digest version instead, send a
blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To SUBSCRIBE forward this message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNSUBSCRIBE, forward this message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Problems/suggestions regarding this list? Email [EMAIL PROTECTED]
___END____________________________________________
