Simon Barnes asked,
| Where did this idea come from ?
The idea came from the law. In countries signatory to the Berne Convention
(which includes most of the homelands of MD-L people, and most importantly
includes the UK, where MD-L runs), copyright is automatic on non-published
works as soon as they are committed to a rereadable medium, without any
registration needed. That certainly applies to items sent only by private
email.
Though as far as I've read there are no cases tried so far, it's generally
taken that reprinting private email in a public forum, such as a newsgroup or
a publicly accessible mailing list, would constitute publication, and there-
fore it is illegal without consent of the author. While a violation would
usually do no monetary detriment to the author it would be hard to collect
damages, but it is still considered very bad netiquette.
Now, if you want to quote some private email in a public place and the author
fails to grant permission (explicit refusal is not necessary), you may still
paraphrase it with credit to the author. That can make the difference really
petty, but copyright covers the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
So if it were my birthday and Simon sent me private email saying, "Happy
birthday, David," I could post here,
Simon wished me a happy birthday.
without breaching his copyright on the message. But if I posted,
Simon wrote to me,
> Happy birthday, David.
then I'd be violating his copyright (besides being off-topic).
As Gaz has noted, it's a good idea, when you reply privately to a post from a
mailing list, to indicate "[private]" or "[sent privately, but OK to quote in
a post if you want]" somewhere on or in the message. A lot of people don't
separate their mail and could mistake a private message about a topic dis-
cussed on a mailing list for a post that came through that list. Now that
many people use the same program to read both email and netnews, it might
also be a good idea to do that when you send a private reply to netnews arti-
cle. And if you quote private email that the author said was all right to
quote (either in the original text or when you later asked for permission),
remember to specify "quoted with permission" or something comparable so that
people won't get on your case for quoting private email without permission.
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