> YOUR PROPRIETARY RIGHTS You agree that upon posting information
> on the Service, you grant eGroups, and its successors and
> assigns, a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty free, perpetual,
> non-revocable license under your copyrights or other
> intellectual property rights, if any, in such material, to use,
> distribute, display, reproduce, and create derivative works from
> such material in any and all media, in any manner, in whole or
> part, without any duty to account to you. You also grant eGroups
> the right to authorize the downloading and printing of such
> material, or any portion thereof, by endusers for their personal
> use.
>
Lawyers dont fuck up, they defend a position. The position of e-
commerce at this point is that there are folks who would sue a
service provider (and whatever else egroups and freemail and
geocities and tripod and all are doing, they provide a service) on the
grounds that if some message *content is arguably improper, then
it is improper to service it.
Its not exactly a coincidence that Demon just lost a libel case in
UK on this reasoning (some Yankee posted something slanderous
to Usenet); what would you do if you were Yahoo -- appeal to the
Queen, amicus curia?
>From the SP pov, the above says: anything we think will cost us
money is going to be yanked forthwith, and there is SFA you can
do about it. The fact that from some picayune 'human rights' pov, it
says that although you may have thought you were getting
something for nothing, in fact you get nothing -- well, it's
unfortunate that so many people are naive, but thats always been
the case -- and equally the case that if you dont instinctively keep
your head down, the way you learn is by getting clobbered.
Now, what is there to be learned? That is, what are the possible
next steps? Will we see Consumers' Union or the IWW organize
an IWWebster's International? Probably not, tho it could be fun to
try.
Will legislation be passed or a Cyberspacial Framework Convention
be enunciated to protect not just freedom of speech but freedom of
dissemination? I doubt it; those are some ways away yet.
Will many individuals look for different SP with different policies?
That's assured, but will it make any *cultural difference? Not at all.
Will more than half a dozen see that the somewhat bigger bone of
contention -- domain names versus trademarks ($70 = free on that
scale) -- is part of the same carcass? You send me your list, and
I'll send you mine, and maybe we can make something of it.
kerry
