tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) (04/01/84)
[ Judging from recent discussion, this article never got out, so I'm resubmitting it. ] In case anyone wants to know how to copyright an article on USENET, that person would be well advised to check out a copy of Writer's Market, which always contains a reasonably lengthy section on copyrights. In essence, this is the method: On the article, place somewhere a message of the form "Copyright <year> By <name>". This is sufficient to establish your claim that the article is copyrighted; you need not register the copyright with the government right away. In fact, if someone violates the copyright and you haven't yet registered it, you are allowed to register it then, so long as the original publication (posting) bore the notice. However, this is somewhat ambiguous. Posting the article is an implicit surrender of certain rights over control, since you are causing it to be copied and recopied many times over. It would be wise to disambiguate which rights you are surrendering. For instance, you might say "All reproduction, except as part of the initial network distribution of the article, and as may be needed for personal reading, without written permission of the author is expressly forbidden." If anyone has a better way to say this, please post it to the net. -- Tim Maroney, The Censored Hacker mcnc!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@csnet-relay (ARPA) All opinions expressed herein are completely my own, so don't go assuming that anyone else at UNC feels the same way.