At 11:31 PM -0400 8/12/99, Tim Pierce wrote:
> Maybe, but you still have to be careful. If you don't reserve the
> right to put archives into "other media," then you can't put them up
> on the Web, for example. Can I cut a CD-ROM of our list archives and
> give it away as a conference freebie? Some people seem to think that
> it's okay as long as we're losing money.
Rule 1 of copyright infringment: money has nothing to do with
infringement (it does, however, have lots to do with recovering
damages, but lets leave that out of this. but you can infringe a
copyright without incurring recoverable damages...).
Again, I'll fall into the realm of implied consent -- if I have
public archives of my lists available and advertised when you sign
up, you're agreeing to be stored in them. but no, that doesn't mean I
can generate a CD-Rom of the archives, because there's no implied or
explicit licensing of that. And if for some reason I chose to do so,
I could change the list agreements, but IMHO, not retroactively. And
down that road lies a real rats nest -- I could, I suppose, ask the
list permission and take a majority view of the sense of the list,
but would that override an individual's rights to be removed from the
published archive? And what about users who've left the list so can't
be asked? Nope. I'm not going there.....
> This year's sensible restriction often turns into next year's
> shortsighted mistake. The battle for preventing CD-ROM redistribution
> was pretty much lost when Walnut Creek started putting news.answers
> and comp.sources on CDs.
Depends. SFWA just won a major victory against Wizards of the Coast,
who tried to do a CD compilation of TSR's Dragon magazine without
paying subsidary rights to authors. And after much gnashing of teeth
and wailing and whining, WotC caved and agreed to pay authors for
re-use of the material.
Depends on what the agreements are, and who's willing to fight for
what, it's far from a lost cause. On usenet, however, I can't believe
that anyone posts to USENET without making the implicit assumption
that the material is public domain (not in legal fact, but in
practical reality) -- because the distribution is so wide,
unrestricted and random taht you really have no hope of proving in a
court that anyone's usage of the material is against the intent of a
USENET posting. Barring explicit copyright restrictions on a USENET
posting, you're granting unrevocable unlimited rights to that
message, because that is really how USENET is defined. And anyone who
believes otherwise is trying to butter both sides of his bread, and
complaining that his fingers get greasy...
IMHO, of course.
--
Chuq Von Rospach (Hockey fan? <http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/>)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
<http://www.plaidworks.com/> + <http://www.lists.apple.com/>
The Jedi that I admire most met up with Darth Maul and now he's toast...
(Weird Al Yankovic - The Saga Begins)
