Christopher Smith wrote:
On Jul 12, 2005, at 9:27 AM, Phil Daley wrote:
At 7/12/2005 09:13 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
I agree with Aaron.
This is a very good point. Dennis has already made generally
available for free a whole cartload of his work (musical and
verbal) while retaining his copyright, on his various websites.
No doubt he considers his writings here to be similar.
Then he needs to mark every message with a Copyright statement.
Otherwise he hasn't a leg to stand on, legally.
I don't know about US copyright law, but in Canada copyright is
applied automatically, with or without the notice. It's kind of like,
this bicycle is mine, even if I DON'T put a sign on it saying so. The
copyright notice is just a warning, or a courtesy, depending on your
intentions.
If he can prove he is the legal author, he has copyright to it,
notice or not.
I wonder if the courts will rule, though, that by posting to a group
where he doesn't know the membership and can't control the membership he
is effectively publishing the messages for any and all to see and read
and archive, and so the archive sites are within their legal rights to
simply be another member of the list.
Sort of like the 'law' of unintended consequences -- posting messages to
an extremely public list (even though it may be called "private" by its
owners, since anybody in the world is free to subscribe, with no
qualifications to be met nor stipulations placed, the courts may view
this as a public list) means that the materials are published with the
intention that users will use them as such materials are commonly used,
printed, read, stored, archived, shared with others not on the list,
forwarded to others, and since no such stipulations are placed on the
messages people who subscribe to this list can reasonably expect that
all the members realize all the uses to which such postings are put and
therefore give tacit agreement to such uses.
It would be very interesting to see how a court would rule if this ever
went to trial!
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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