Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!zodiac!joyce!hercules!fernwood!asylum!romkey
From: romkey@asylum.SF.CA.US (John Romkey)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: duh copyright (was Re: In Moderation - Good or Bad?)
Message-ID: <2512@asylum.SF.CA.US>
Date: 14 Jun 89 22:29:25 GMT
References: <1989Jun12.100943.24233@ateng.ateng.com> <2482@asylum.SF.CA.US> <1989Jun14.173722.23402@ateng.com>
Reply-To: romkey@asylum.UUCP (John Romkey,The Asylum)
Organization: The Asylum; Belmont, CA
Lines: 62

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