romkey@asylum.SF.CA.US (John Romkey) (06/15/89)
In article <1989Jun14.173722.23402@ateng.com> chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes: >An explicit copyright notice is not required. For some months now, all >works in the U.S.A are born copyrighted. Something called the Berne >Convention, an international agreement about copyrights, has finally been >signed by the U.S.A. Yeah, I know. But I think it would be advisable to make sure that the part of your message that contains the redistribution rights that you want to assign readers clearly as such, so that other people can't say "Oh, I thought you were just quoting John Gilmore" or something stupid like that. Some people might use that as an excuse, some might actually think that... This is a wandering from the subject, a bit, and more a general comment on this flurry of copyrights. It's not meant to be an exposition on in depth copyright law. Unfortunately, my books on copyright are all out of the house right now, so I can't check on this stuff. I've always felt that copyrights were a way of claiming rights to a work. That is, saying "John Romkey wrote this message and owns it". And it's pretty reasonable to assign some redistribution rights in the copyright itself, for instance, that anyone may redistribute it, or that all rights are reserved, or whatever. But then the rights sometimes start to get so complicated that it's more of what I consider to a license, or contractual agreement between two parties: the author and the reader. I can't draw the exact line between the two. The GNU copyright, for instance, evolved into the GNU General Public License. Anyway, it seems that at some point, a copyright can start putting such an onus on the reader that the reader should explicitly have to agree to it. That's the technical problem with these distribution restrictions like "You may not redistribute this message" that we've been seeing lately (other than that they're silly, which I think is fine). When the author starts insisting on very complicated rights, if the reader has no option of agreeing or disagreeing with them, then it seems to me that it's up to the author not to put the reader in a compromising position, or the author loses his rights. >>By the way, suppose that IN MODERATION does not restrict the flow of >>"raw USENET" articles, but instead, prunes some out and adds messages >>from the moderator summarizing things and such, and did not restrict >>the raw original USENET stuff. Would this satisfy you? > >Yes, of course. Free distribution of partial feeds is a Usenet tradition. Okay. Just wanted to make sure. I don't know yet what IMN's actual policies are or will be, guess I'll see how they fit when I find out. By the way, I'd like to point out that although my name is mentioned in the announcement, I have NOTHING to do with IMN other than that I occasionally have dinner with Geoff Goodfellow and we talk about networks. I even pay for my own meal. I receive a full newsfeed from his machine, fernwood, but I also get other feeds from other UUCP neighbors. I just want to be clear about my association with IMN since my name is mentioned in the message: I'm not taking this side in the discussion because I have anything to gain from it. I don't. -- - john romkey USENET/UUCP: romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us Internet: romkey@ftp.com "Because fate causes fortune and fortune takes it away "And then fortune causes nightmares...nightmares make you crazy" - Stevie Nicks