brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (11/24/88)
I thought we went over all this before, but I will lay it out once again to put the matter to rest. (There's even a joke at the end!) Q: Can you do commercial activity on USENET? A: There is a popular myth that commercial activity is not allowed or encouraged on USENET. This is false. It goes on all the time, and the only criterion that really applies is whether net readers get something of value from it. Comp.newprod exists. Many companies do tech support over the net. Everybody in comp.unix.xenix is thrilled to have SCO active there, and everybody in comp.sys.ibm.pc is pleased to have MKS and other companies there. Another moderator, Chuq Von Rospach, has an newsgroup where every issue advertises that the fanzine is available in print form, for a fee. He even advertised T-shirts in the last issue. Non-net related material, like "New Chevrolets for sale," is discouraged. Q: Does your book provide something of value to the net? A: That's up to you, but based on mail I have gotten, and orders, I would say, definitely yes. Among other things, the book will *save* the net money by reducing calls for, and repostings of, popular jokes like the Purity test and many others. It is also good for the people who mail me asking for back-jokes. Finally, the many who subscribed after Aug 1977 get to see the rest of the jokes. Everybody gets to see the oldies and other unpublished stuff. Q: What about the ARPANET? A: Commercial activity is not allowed on the ARPANET. As I suspect some people forward the group there, I made a note that those messages should not be forwarded on the ARPANET proper. I hope people concerned about the messages there will delete them. They were plainly marked as commercial messages. I will do whatever else I can to help ensure that the ARPANET is not seriously compromised. Q: Are you making money on the book? A: Depends on how many I sell. If I only sell my initial print run, then I would judge that I am not. Out of $9.95 comes not just 162 pages of photocopying, plus metal plate printed covers, binding, your time on the 800 number (about 82 cents/minute), ordering time and credit card charges, but also a portion of a couple of solid weeks of work typesetting the book, costs of pasteup and camerawork, DTP equipment and lots of other stuff. Ask somebody who's done small volume publishing and book production! Price it yourself. Q: What if you sell a lot? (thousands) A: Well, then, I will make money. It will take a few if I account for my time as I would bill for expert software work, which is what I normally do. I've published 9 products, all with great reps, and I'm no slouch in that area. I really put the book together as a labour of love, but if I make money from it, I'm damn well going to keep it. I'm not even counting the hundreds of hours I put into selecting the jokes as moderator, including writing personal notes to 99% of the thousands and thousands of submissions over the past year. (In fact, if you appreciated that, just send me bags of money! :-) ) Q: Will you provide an accounting of the book later? A: No. Sorry, but that's my private business. There is nothing wrong with what I'm doing, and I shouldn't really have to defend it. I do, and do, and do for you kids, and this is the thanks I get. Q: I support you. I'll send you mail to tell you so. A: Please don't, as I explained in a previous posting. It's very nice to get all this fan mail, and thanks, but I do have to get back to real work now that the book is out. If you really want to support me, get out your credit card and dial 1-800-.... :-) But seriously folks, I must admit I can't complain about the fact that Matt Crawford's ravings have *increased* sales of the book. (Just as Richmond's complaints caused a flood of Jewish joke submissions to funny@looking, even though I asked for the reverse.) Q: You're scum. I'll send you mail to tell you so. A: It's a free continent, mostly. I can't say I'll agree or even reply, at this point, but it's up to you. Q: Is Ty Templeton (the illustrator) really your brother? A: Hard to say, but yes, we do share 4 of the same parents. (Our parents have been married 3 times each. As Ty says, I don't drink, except at family weddings. Some people say that makes me an alcoholic.) Q: What does Matt Crawford have against you? A: Damned if I know. Maybe I rejected one of his jokes. I know he got upset once when he got confused and saw racism in a joke about Jesse Jackson, but that's not enough to explain his vendetta. Only his brain surgeon knows for sure. :-) (If somebody *really* knows the reason, you can mail me.) Q: What's the difference between a duck? A: Sorry, your joke is rejected because it's been bantered around a lot on rec.humor, and I feel it is moderately well known. Keep trying, though... -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (11/28/88)
>Q: Can you do commercial activity on USENET? > >A: There is a popular myth that commercial activity is not allowed or > encouraged on USENET. This is false. It goes on all the time, and > the only criterion that really applies is whether net readers get > something of value from it. Excuse me for coming into a conversation late, but nobody bothered to tell me that Brad had brought me into the discussion before now. [It's generally a good idea to make sure that if you're bitching about someone on the net publicly, they know about it -- I gave up reading news.* months ago, and if it weren't for a net-friend, I'd STILL not know about this...] Anyway, I think Brad's wrong here. The only criterion is whether or not the net readers let you get away with it. Value has nothing to do with it. If you do something wrong but benign, or stupid but meaningless, or if they simply don't care, nobody will call you on it. On the other hand -- on the Internet, commercial activity is explicitly against the rules and CAN get you in trouble. Add that to the large number of Internet-based NNTP links and Brad's all-too-true statement above about it happening all the time, and ask yourself if USENET is violating Internet rules.... > Another moderator, Chuq Von Rospach, has an newsgroup where every > issue advertises that the fanzine is available in print form, for > a fee. True. This happens to be the first time someone's mentioned the possible conflicts to me, and thinking about it, it's probably a bad idea -- especially with the Internet connections for OtherRealms. I probably should *not* be doing it, so starting next issue, I won't. Something bland and non-commercial like: Subscriptions to the printed version of OtherRealms are available. Contact me for details will be used instead. >He even advertised T-shirts in the last issue. I certainly did. And if the subscriptions are marginal, the T-shirt sale was blatantly wrong. Frankly, until Brad brought it up here, I never even thought of the implications of it. The cost of the T-shirts is about $.50 less than my real cost, but that's a non-issue. I shouldn't have done it. I'll excise the advertisement from my archive-server and make sure it doesn't happen in a future issue. Not a good thing to do, and I'm sorry it slipped past. I don't believe either of these situations, by the way, gives Brad any precedent for doing his book. The fact that I got away with something that was wrong (or potentially wrong, depending on which case you look at) doesn't mean what he's doing is right. It just means nobody complained about the problem until now, and I didn't catch it. Oh, well. I'll be more careful in the future. >Q: What if you sell a lot? (thousands) If you take the track record of OtherRealms, not bloody likely. Besides, if you ask me, whether something makes money (like Brad's book) or loses money (like OtherRealms or my T-shirt) is a non-issue. Money is money, and whether there's too much of it or too little of it is immaterial. ---- Those directly related comments aside, let me put in a few cents worth of my thoughts on this whole shebang. First, *legally* Brad can do whatever he wants with those jokes. They were posted, in the public domain, to an open forum. If he wants to collect them and publish them, he's welcome to. Public domain means just that -- free and clear to any comer. Unless he uses a joke that was posted with a copyright notice without the permission of the copyright holder, there's no legal restriction on what he's doing. On the other hand, if someone took a copyrighted joke and posted it to the net (itself being a copyright violation) doesn't explicitly make the joke a public domain piece. Unless Brad verifies that the material really, truly is public domain, he's asking for someone to come and file copyright violations against him. The fact that he got it from a source that he felt was public domain isn't necessarily a reasonable defense and definitely wouldn't pay his legal fees -- and even if he could pin the violation back on the original poster in a legally provable way, he could still find himself liably for not doing the research and carrying the violation forward. Copyright is such FUN stuff..... If you ask me, any 'precedent' set by OtherRealms about this sort of stuff isn't applicable to Brad's book anyway. Why? Because: o All material in OtherRealms is original to OtherRealms (with very few exceptions for which I have explicit permission from the owner). It is published in a copyrighted, printed form, and a version of that is made available on the net. On the other hand, Brad's book: o takes openly posted, public domain material on the net, re-packages it into a commercial form, and re-sells it. I am taking material and, with the explicit permission of the owner, making it available on the net. Brad is taking material from the net, packaging it and selling it. There is, I submit, no similarity between what Brad is doing and what I do. Besides, even if the precedents WERE applicable, the fact that I got away with something that was wrong (which I admit, and which I will change in the future) doesn't give Brad permission to do the same. Two wrongs, and all that. This whole discussion comes down to one of ethics. Legally, Brad can do what he's doing. The question, though, is ethical: SHOULD he do it? Is it 'right' to take material from the net and package it for sale? This ethical problem doesn't come up with OtherRealms, because my material never originated on the net, and is made available on the net only as a service to the readers. Even though it's legally public domain, is it proper for Brad to do it? THAT's a question I'm not gonna touch. You folks can have lots of fun arguing ethics -- I've got a magazine to put out. I don't have patience for mindless flame-wars anymore. (A few side-comments before I go. If you *don't* want folks to use your stuff, copyright the articles. And if you don't think Brad should do what he's doing, don't buy the book -- if he loses his shirt over this, he's VERY unlikely to do it again. Finally, if you don't support his actions, don't read his group of post to it. If the submissions stop, that's a statement in itself) If you ask me, this is a perfect reason why kill files were created. If you don't like what Brad's doing, do what I did after Brad posted that shitty Tiptree 'joke' last April and refused to acknowledge his actions -- put Brad in your kill file and make him go away. Creative use of kill files and the 'u' command make USENET a much quieter and more intelligent place to play. The REALITY is you'll never make USENET act like you want it to, but with kill files you can snip off the parts that most offend your senses without trying to force YOUR view of reality on the rest of us. What Brad is doing may well be stupid (or it may not be -- I'm NOT getting in that discussion, thank you, although I will drop broad hints) but there's an amazing amount of equally (or more) stupid shit going on as well. I've found it much easier on my ulcer to stop trying to clean out the Augean stables of the net. Let folks have their stupidity if they want it -- but don't feel you need to cooperate. If enough people ignore it, it will whither on the vine and go away. And if enough people DO want it enough to make it survive or prosper, then it's likely your view of 'ethical' is different from the majority of the net.... Chuq Von Rospach Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms chuq@sun.COM I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him. For Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all, all honorable men.
era@scdpyr.ucar.edu (Ed Arnold) (11/29/88)
In article <79090@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: > >On the other hand -- on the Internet, commercial activity is explicitly >against the rules and CAN get you in trouble. Add that to the large number >of Internet-based NNTP links and Brad's all-too-true statement above about >it happening all the time, and ask yourself if USENET is violating Internet >rules.... > Maybe I'm dense, but I don't understand. Brad's commercial activity is *overt*. However, everytime I mail Chuq at sun.com because my sun is broke and I want it fixed, *that's commercial activity too* ... I'm quite sure that a lot of sun customers (and apollo customers and mips customers and blah blah) are using a lot of internet bandwidth to get their systems serviced, albeit in a *covert* manner. So, what's the real difference? Isn't this discussion just a lot of "angels on the head of a pin" silliness? __________ Ed Arnold * NCAR (Nat'l Center for Atmospheric Research) * Mesa Lab PO Box 3000 * Boulder, CO 80307-3000 * 303-497-1253 * 303-494-6949 (home) era@ncar.ucar.edu [128.117.64.4] * {ames,gatech,noao,...}!ncar!era
crew@Polya.Stanford.EDU (Roger Crew) (11/29/88)
In article <79090@sun.uucp>, chuq%plaid (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: > > First, *legally* Brad can do whatever he wants with those jokes. They were > posted, in the public domain, to an open forum. If he wants to collect them > and publish them, he's welcome to. Public domain means just that -- free and > clear to any comer. Now here's a thought: It's public domain, so by this reasoning ANYONE could have been sitting out there collecting all of the postings to rec.humor.funny. For that matter, anyone could STILL do it. I wonder how annoyed Brad would be if someone else put out a r.h.f book (not all that much, I suspect...) What I REALLY wonder is how long it will be before someone decides to try this with some other group. I'm sure a compilation of, say, soc.singles postings would do quite well as a mass-market paperback; it might take a bit of creative editing, but I'm sure you can see the possibilities... Just a small matter of talking to my friends in the publishing business. If only I were running an archive site. 7/8 :-) -- Roger Crew Copyright 1988 -- All Rights Reserved. (so there!) Usenet: {arpa gateways, decwrl, uunet, rutgers}!polya.stanford.edu!crew Internet: crew@polya.Stanford.EDU
jim@eda.com (Jim Budler) (11/30/88)
In article <1057@ncar.ucar.edu> era@scdpyr.UCAR.EDU (Ed Arnold) writes: | In article <79090@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: | > | >On the other hand -- on the Internet, commercial activity is explicitly | >against the rules and CAN get you in trouble. Add that to the large number | >of Internet-based NNTP links and Brad's all-too-true statement above about | >it happening all the time, and ask yourself if USENET is violating Internet | >rules.... | > | Maybe I'm dense, but I don't understand. Maybe I'm dense, but I don't understand. What does it matter if USENET violates Internet rules? Or are we to follow other networks in complying with Internet rules because it is easier than not complying? "Violating their rules can get you into trouble". You mean like suspended from Internet? I'm not on Internet in the first place. I'm not on the Internet, don't have Internet advantages, but have to abide by Internet restrictions? Brad specifically asked that those messages not be gatewayed onto the Internet. And I'm *sure* the Automatic Gatewaying Software complied. 8^) We're always running into this "not allowed on the Internet" argument and I would really like someone to intelligently define to me why I should care. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ jim -- Jim Budler address = uucp: ...!{decwrl,uunet}!eda!jim OR domain: jim@eda.com #define disclaimer "I do not speak for my employer" #define truth "I speak for myself" #define result "variable"
chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (11/30/88)
>What I REALLY wonder is how long it will be before someone decides to >try this with some other group. I'm sure a compilation of, say, >soc.singles postings would do quite well as a mass-market paperback; >it might take a bit of creative editing, but I'm sure you can see the >possibilities... Just a small matter of talking to my friends in the >publishing business. Just ask Brian Reid -- this happened to mod.recipes (now alt.gourmand) years ago. Which is one of the many reasons why OtherRealms is the way it is, and why I scream as loudly as I do every time someone mucks with my copyrights to OtherRealms material on the net (violation #3 and counting....) Chuq Von Rospach Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms chuq@sun.COM I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him. For Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all, all honorable men.
woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (11/30/88)
In article <5322@polya.Stanford.EDU> crew@Polya.Stanford.EDU (Roger Crew) writes: >What I REALLY wonder is how long it will be before someone decides to >try this with some other group. It has already happened. A few months back there was a big furor in rec.music.gdead because someone was selling flyers at concerts that contained, among other things, postings taken from the net. --Greg
brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (11/30/88)
While I responded to Chuq (an old member of the anti-me bandwagon) via private mail, I had better clear up some more misconceptions I have seen in followups. a) Because it's on the net doesn't mean it's public domain. It means it's been sent to unlimited distribution to the "net." I can still be owned, and in many cases it is. Currently the book is really only being sold to net folks. b) Many net postings (particularly rec.humor postings) are public domain simply because they were before they were posted. c) A collection of PD work collected by one person is *not* public domain. The elements are still PD, but only the collector may publish the collection. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
inc@tc.fluke.COM (Gary Benson) (12/01/88)
Nice posting, Chuq. I was with you right up until you [mis]quoted
Shakespeare. Here's how I remember the opeining of Marc Antony's speech:
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives
after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be
with Caesar.
The nobel Brutus hath told you that Caesar was ambitious; if it were so,
it was a grevious fault, and greviously hath Caesar answered it.
Otherwise, nice job. Thanks for the posting.chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (12/01/88)
>Nice posting, Chuq. I was with you right up until you [mis]quoted >Shakespeare. Here's how I remember the opeining of Marc Antony's speech: Actually, it isn't misquoting, but excerpting. I probably should have added elipsis to show the parts I left out, but I wanted to keep it short. Chuq Von Rospach Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms chuq@sun.COM I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him. For Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all, all honorable men.
dlm@cuuxb.ATT.COM (Dennis L. Mumaugh) (12/04/88)
In article <5322@polya.Stanford.EDU> crew@Polya.Stanford.EDU
(Roger Crew) writes:
What I REALLY wonder is how long it will be before someone
decides to try this with some other group. I'm sure a
compilation of, say, soc.singles postings would do quite well
as a mass-market paperback; it might take a bit of creative
editing, but I'm sure you can see the possibilities... Just
a small matter of talking to my friends in the publishing
business.
You might talk to Brian Reid about alt.gourmand. A while back
some one was going to publish the USENET cookbook. So, he now
coypyrights each posting. He has a thing called the USENET
Community Trust. I am sure he'll give more details if he feels
like it and sees my post.
--
=Dennis L. Mumaugh
Lisle, IL ...!{att,lll-crg}!cuuxb!dlm OR cuuxb!dlm@arpa.att.com