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
mcb@eris.berkeley.edu (Michael C. Berch) (09/05/88)
In article <13844@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes: > 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. Righto. The technical reason for this is that the letter is *not published*. There is a body of jurisprudence about exactly what constitutes "publication" for copyright (and for libel/slander) purposes; the criteria for publication include the number of intended recipients, whether the author *intended* to keep the communication private (shown by direct or circumstantial evidence), the means of communication, etc. So a letter sent via sealed first class mail from one individual to another is undoubtedly unpublished (and the author retains intellectual property rights to it), unless the author can be shown to have implicitly "published" the letter, as in including a statement like "feel free to redistribute this". On the other hand, a form letter sent to thousands of recipients who are not personally known to the author may well be construed to have been published, and the latter would pass into the public domain if the author did not affix notice of copyright. On the other hand, as I have tried to point out here and there, the *information* contained in private mail is NOT protected by copyright law, merely the fixed embodiment of the idea in particular prose. (It may be protected from disclosure by trade secret law, by previous agreeement of the parties, by a fiduciary relationship, or by other law [e.g., classified information].) So if Dr. Weemba writes me a letter in which he asserts that, say, the Military Governor of Fredonia is a pinhead, I am perfectly free to report that fact to others. Michael C. Berch Member of the California Bar mcb@eris.berkeley.edu / mcb@tis.llnl.gov / ucbvax!eris!mcb