weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) (09/02/88)
I think it's time that something about this was put in n.a.newusers, considering how often this brand of ignorance comes up. I'm directing followups to news.misc. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I have read what lawyers have said about copyright, both on the net and in books. Believe at your own risk. >>Setting aside *******'s apparent serious breach of net-ethics by >>publishing someone's email without permission, >Once delivered, mail is the property of the recipient. Its dispensation >is at the sole discretion of the owner, including publishing via >whatever medium he/she chooses. This is not just libertarian rhetoric. >The concept is actually applied by the U.S. Postal Service! If you are referring to surface mail, **copyright** is maintained by the sender. The recipient *owns* the mail, but absolutely zero rights to publish it any form--and those rights are what copyright is all about in the first place. The letter is *born* copyrighted; there is no need for any explicit (C) kind of indications. This has been tested--successfully--in court, most notably in the recent J D Salinger lawsuit. The letters in question were sent to someone half a century ago, and said someone eventually donated or sold them--as was the recipient's rights by way of owning the "letter" (as opposed to own- ing the "words") and eventually they ended up in Princeton University's library, if I remember correctly. Princeton can exploit its ownership in many ways: putting the letters on display, keeping them locked up, lending them to a Salinger museum, whatever. But Princeton has no rights to *publish* the letters without the copyright holder's permission, nor can anyone else. This isn't very subtle: just because I spent a quarter for the local newspaper, does not mean I can now exert my "ownership" of this copy of the paper and run an optical scanner on the paper and post the results to Usenet. (Thank God!) I can do other things, though, like give or sell my newspaper to someone else. If ******* plans someday to be the first volunteer to test this prin- ciple in court with regards to *electronic* mail, he's welcome to it. Of course, if the rest of us call him "stupid" or "foolhardy" for this line of action, he shouldn't be too surprised. ucbvax!garnet!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720