rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) (02/03/89)
In <2712@looking.UUCP> funny-request@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
<The contents of rec.humor.funny are compilation copyright 1987, 1988,
<1989 by Brad Templeton. ...
<A licence is granted to the owners of computer systems on what is
<commonly known as USENET to read and/or store this compilation in electronic
<form for up to 2 months, and to forward it to other computers on the
<USENET network. This licence can be revoked at any time, from any
<individual user, site or subnet, whether they are considered to be on
<USENET or not. Some sites, most notably those at the University of
<Waterloo, have already lost some use of the licence granted above, and
<their administrators know who they are. What this means is that if you're
<not sure you're on USENET, and you want to forward the group, just ask me.
<It's very likely I will say yes. I just want to keep track and keep control.
This is a complete and total load of crap.
It should be stopped, now!
/rich $alz
--
Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net.john@stiatl.UUCP (John DeArmond) (02/04/89)
In article <1449@papaya.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes: >In <2712@looking.UUCP> funny-request@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: ><The contents of rec.humor.funny are compilation copyright 1987, 1988, ><1989 by Brad Templeton. ... > ><A licence is granted to the owners of computer systems on what is ><commonly known as USENET to read and/or store this compilation in electronic (misc bs deleted) > >This is a complete and total load of crap. > >It should be stopped, now! > /rich $alz >-- Boy!!!! you can say that again. Brad, we stuck with you thru the net.facists.censors assault, the university.airhead campaign, and the commercial media smear. I don't even have any problem with you compiling a year's worth of jokes and publishing them. But now you are totally out of bounds. This network is public domain and if you don't want anything in the public domain, DON'T POST IT. As for the copyrights and "distribution rights" statements, you can take them and pound sand. John -- John De Armond, WD4OQC | Manual? ... What manual ?!? Sales Technologies, Inc. Atlanta, GA | This is Unix, My son, You ...!gatech!stiatl!john | just GOTTA Know!!!
mark@deltam.UUCP (mark galbraith) (02/04/89)
In article <1449@papaya.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes: >In <2712@looking.UUCP> funny-request@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: ><The contents of rec.humor.funny are compilation copyright 1987, 1988, ><1989 by Brad Templeton. ... > ><A licence is granted to the owners of computer systems on what is ><commonly known as USENET to read and/or store this compilation in electronic > . > . ><not sure you're on USENET, and you want to forward the group, just ask me. ><It's very likely I will say yes. I just want to keep track and keep control. Judging from what Brad is saying in his posting, he is claiming to own the jokes he is sent to put on the net. 'Tain't so Brad!! The copyright, if any, belongs to the person who *CREATED* the joke, not the last person to propagate it. I think Brad should read the section of the Usenet installation manual on copyright law. In this article the author, Jordan Breslow (415-932-4828), discusses ownership rights, and other related topics. This should be required reading for all administrators on the net. Brad has overstepped his responsiblity, and will be lucky if there isn't a lawsuit filed over his plagerism. I think the biggest joke here are the words "Copyright by Brad Templeton." The problem is, the joke isn't that funny. ============================================================================ Mark Galbraith Voice: 415-449-6881 Delta Microsystems UUCP: uunet!deltam!tech!mark ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The opinions expressed herein are my own. "Don't worry... My employer may or may not share my opionions. ...be happy!!"
mml@magnus.UUCP (Mike Levin) (02/05/89)
In article <2944@stiatl.UUCP> john@stiatl.UUCP (John DeArmond) writes: >As for the copyrights and "distribution rights" statements, you can take them >and pound sand. Oh, come on John. I thought it was pretty funny. It kind of reminds me off the FBI notices at the beginning of video tapes. You know, when you're watching and you just have to say: ### ### ##### ####### ####### ####### ####### # ### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ## ## # # # # # # # # # # # # ## # ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ### # # ##### ####### ####### ####### ####### ### #### #### ## ##### ###### ##### ### # # # # # # # # # # ### #### # # # # # ##### # # # # # ###### ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ### #### #### # # # # ###### ##### ### I guess that Brad's just running out of normal humor, so he's resorted to copyright humor. Mike Levin -- +---+ P L E A S E R E S P O N D T O: +---+ * * * * * * * * * * | Michael M. Levin, Silent Radio, Los Angeles | I never thought I'd be LOOKING |{aeras|csun|mtune|pacbell|srhqla}!magnus!levin| for something to say! ! ! +----------------------------------------------+------------------------------+
PLS@cup.portal.com (Paul L Schauble) (02/06/89)
Wait a minute! Before you start flaming Brad, please understand what he is saying. If you're going to flame him, please do so accurately. Brad is claiming a compilation or collection copyright. This is NOT the same thing as claiming copyright on the jokes themselves. A collection copyright covers the collection as a whole, not the individual items in it. An excellect example would be a legal publisher who published state laws. They obviously do not have copyright on the laws themselves, which are public domain. They do have copyright on the collection as a whole. Another excellent example is short story collections. The publisher of the collection has a copyright on the collection, but not on the stories themselves. They stories may be published freely, but if someone published exactly the same collection, that would infringe the collection copyright. The idea behind this is that the task of selecting the item for the collection and arranging them is original work that should be protected. As I read Brad's posting, he intends to use this to prevent a replay of the recent flap. Any site that objects to the jokes will find themselves off the distribution. I think a direct analogy is that a lot of the software posted in the various net.sources and net.binaries groups says something like Copyright 1988 by J. Random Programmer May be freely distributed for non-commercial use as long as no fee is charged for the distribution. This copyright has never provoked objections. As long as Brad is reasonable about his, I'm inclined to go with it. ++PLS
karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (02/07/89)
Brad seems to be asserting a copyright for two different reasons. One is to protect himself (?) from attack as the moderator of rec.humor.funny. The other appears to be to stake out a percentage of profits being derived by others through the resale of r.h.f. It won't work, not yet. We're not ready for it. The issues this raises are numerous and will only be hashed out at great length in the usual net.fashion. For example, you seem to imply that you're eventually going to strong-arm Portal and other pay-for-play systems to pay you to carry the group. What about the owners of all the systems who paid money out of their pockets to pass your group to the pay systems? Shouldn't they (we) be compensated, too? This arrangement, like shareware, attempts to establish an end-to-end payment between user and author (or user and "compilation copyright holder"), bypassing the people who spend their money to store and/or forward the material for you. To be fair, shouldn't everyone have to pay end-to-end charges for any mail they send? Perhaps under a less-cooperative (but more "fair") arrangement, you should have to pay some fee for it to be carried all over, and you should get paid any time someone reads it. If not enough people read it to cover your costs, you lose money. This would be more in line with conventional publishing. I have never been comfortable with "compilation copyrights" in the first place. The first time I ever heard of them was in regard to a company selling disks of public domain PC software for a few bucks each. Since it was all public domain, others started selling copies of their disks. As I understood it, they successfully claimed that their ordering of what programs went on what disks was itself copyrighted, such that others could not produce disks of PD software matching theirs. What I don't like about it, and I don't mean any offense in this to Brad, is that there is'nt a lot of value added in producing the compilation. I think Brad is really funny; "Dear Emily Postnews" is a classic. Nonetheless, many others could do nearly as good a job, and there are probably quite a few who'd be willing to try. The reason to moderate a group, as mentioned by the moderator of the telecom digest, is for fun, because there are few other rewards to be had from it, and once it ceases to be fun, one should probably stop doing it. I hope all this doesn't cause Brad to leave the net in anger. I do think he's unilaterally decided something that we, those of us who affect the policies of the operation of the machines of the net, are not ready to sign up to without a good deal more thought, comment and flaming. -- -- uunet!sugar!karl | "We've been following your progress with considerable -- karl@sugar.uu.net | interest, not to say contempt." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox IV -- Usenet BBS (713) 438-5018
roger_warren_tang@cup.portal.com (02/07/89)
God, you guys are a RIOT! As copyright lawyers, you guys as a group a bunch of pretty good programmers. You know, you'd do us proud at Portal.
gerard@uwovax.uwo.ca (Gerard Stafleu) (02/08/89)
In article <3400@sugar.uu.net>, karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes: > Brad seems to be asserting a copyright for two different reasons. One is > to protect himself (?) from attack as the moderator of rec.humor.funny. > The other appears to be to stake out a percentage of profits being derived > by others through the resale of r.h.f. Stake out a percentage? When did he ever say that? He has made it clear from the beginning that he is after a way to avoid a repeat of the recent spat. Differentiating between for-profit and not-for-profit organizations tallies very well with this: usually your liablity is greater when you get paid than when you do not get paid. Brad's desire for some protection against the type of unfair attack that we have recently seen is quite legitimate. And let us not forget that he is not trying to protect himself (and possibly others in a similar position) against anything from within the net. If everything had stayed within the net, there would have been no problem. The opinion of the net went in great majority against Mr. Richmont, and that should have been the end of it. The problems arose when Mr. Richmont went outside the net, to newspapers, employers etc. So please net.people, do not feel personally attacked. Protective measures are not aimed against you, but against "the outside". The desire for protection against this outside interference is fair, and solutions should be seriously considered. Perhaps Brad has gone a bit far in his proposed solution. If so, this should be reasonably discussed, and the net should come up with viable, constructive counter proposals. I do not think that asking for Brads removal as moderator falls under that catagory. Neither does saying "if you can't stand the heat,...". I will now state my (counter) proposal for protective measures. It does two things with respect to Brad's proposal: 1) Do it without copyright, as that seems to be very controversial, and 2) do it via the sysadmins. There are some newsgroups that every sysadmin is expected to read all the time (news.announce.important, news.sysadmin). To these groups a notice could be posted regularly (monthly?), stating that the responsibility for passing on any newsgroup to their direct end users (and NOT to downstream nodes), rest with the sysadmin of the node. No one else is responsible for anything in a news group, except the _original_ author of a posting (and NOT the moderator, if the article is in a moderated group). This proposal gives moderators some protection against outside attacks. It avoids complications with down stream liablity, as responsibility is located in the local sysadmin and the original author only. The protection is probably less than with Brad's copyright scheme (because the copyright scheme uses concepts from the outside, so you are meeting them on their own terms). But then the price for that larger protection might be too high. I suggest we try something like the scheme I described, and go only to more rigorous methods if the scheme proves not to work.
dww@stl.stc.co.uk (David Wright) (02/08/89)
Are all USAians paranoid, I wonder, or is it just those who post on these
groups? Having met many sane ones, I shall assume the latter.
As someone else has said, stop crying when you haven't been hurt.
It's true that Brad doesn't own rec.humor.funny (or if he does, it's the
way someone 'owns' a cat), but he created it in the first place and has
put far more into it than most of his detractors have put into the whole
d**n net. You can take it away from him if you want, but if you do, you
will be destroying a valuable work - the group would not be the same without
Brad. Why do you think it's one of the most popular groups on the net?
In the (unlikely) event that the net votes against Brad as moderator, or in
the (more likely) event that he decides putting all his time into it isn't
fun anymore, I think you'll find a lot of us would stop reading - or even
stop taking - a non-Bradian rec.humor.funny. And - far more important -
a net in which one of the most hard working and long suffering moderators
had been hounded out *BY THE NET* would be a sad and bitter place. Who
would want to be associated with such a thing?
By all means disagree with Brad if he makes a mistake, but this bitter
paranoid flaming is not the way to disagree.
--
Regards, "Just 'cos you CAN send messages everywhere, doesn't mean you HAVE to"
David Wright STL, London Road, Harlow, Essex CM17 9NA, UK
dww@stl.stc.co.uk <or> ...uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!dww <or> PSI%234237100122::DWWgreg@bilbo (Greg Wageman) (02/09/89)
OK, I'll help get this discussion going. In my opinion, Brad is asking to be removed as moderator of rec.humor.funny. He may not even know this himself. All of his most recent actions indicate to me that he is tired of the heat he's taking, and the hassles he's getting, but can't bring himself to resign as moderator (and I can't say I fault him for that). So let's all help Brad by voting to have him removed as moderator of rec.humor.funny. Do it for his own good, as a favor. Don't think of it as punishment, or revenge, or censorship. After all, it's *your* newsgroup, no matter what the current moderator says. Or, perhaps, in spite of it. And, Brad, lest you think this is some kind of personal attack, let me just say that some of my best friends are Canadians. I'm just poking fun at moderators, anyone can see that. And, even if you can't, my position is protected by free speech. Have a nice day. Signature follows. Hit 'n' now. You have been warned! Greg Wageman ARPA: uunet.uu.net!sjsca4!greg (Temporarily) Schlumberger Technologies UUCP: ...!uunet!sjsca4!greg San Jose, CA ------------------ Opinions expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the author. And the author wouldn't have it any other way.