Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!caen!ox.com!msen.com!emv From: emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti) Newsgroups: comp.archives.admin Subject: Re: copyright status and future development of comp.archives Message-ID: Date: 21 Jun 91 10:03:35 GMT References: <1991Jun21.074613.10883@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: usenet@ox.com (Usenet News Administrator) Organization: MSEN, Inc. Ann Arbor MI Lines: 91 In-Reply-To: adam@soda.berkeley.edu's message of 21 Jun 91 07:46:13 GMT In article <1991Jun21.074613.10883@agate.berkeley.edu> adam@soda.berkeley.edu (Adam J. Richter) writes: If you want to produce a copyrighted newsgroup, then please don't use a newsgroup in a hierarchy that is normally propogated over NSFNet and BARRNet, which prohibit most forms of commercial usage. Such a blatant and willful violation of the Interim NSFNet Acceptable Use Policy, apparently with the complete knowledge and sanction of your company, is unprecedented in the history of the NSFNet, to the best of my knowledge. Your encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the NSFNet is most welcomed. I trust that you are also reading the com-priv mailing list, which deals with the commercialization and privatization of the Internet; those archives are kept at uu.psi.com:/archives/com-priv/* for your further entertainment. I don't know if the folks at NSF could do more than threaten to disconnect sites that transmit comp.archives over NSFNet, or if you could be prosecuted for whatever laws exist to make it illegal to make unauthorized use of other people's computer equipement (such as the NSFNet backbone), or, for that matter, if the law is any different when the computers that you are misusing are owned by the federal government. Your encyclopedic knowledge of the law is also highly regarded. I'd recommend browsing through the Computer Underground Digest archives that Brendan Kehoe maintains on ftp.cs.widener.edu:/pub/cud/, in particular the "networks" and "law" directories there. I suspect that what would happen would be that comp.archives would simply not be carried on NSFNet. Should that be a matter of concern to us, we would deal with it as the matter arose. This is not to say that copyrighted newsgroups are a bad thing, but that they should be transmitted by permission of those who carry them. Absolutely. And people who are getting them shouldn't pass them along to their neighbors unless their neighbors are properly authorized to carry them, and they shouldn't be transmitted over networks which have restrictive usage policies. At worst you might have to make long distance phone calls direct back to the source of the information. I doubt that you can actually copyright other people's postings without their consent any more than I can scratch out a copyright notice on a book and replace it with my own. I wonder if you'd be in violation of any laws regarding copyright and fraud. I wonder if you and your company could be sued by the original authors of the postings or by anybody else who was effected by your copyright notices. I agree that it is going to be important to keep things on the up and up, and to pay attention to the intellectual property rights of everyone involved. That's why it would be ideal if the work were funded by some entity which wouldn't assert any additional rights over the work, they'd just give it away for free. Consider the following prospect. comp.archives continues on much as it is today, except that articles don't have any additional information added to them when I repost them, and I don't necessarily go to all of the trouble of verifying location information. Other comp.archives contributors add location information, snappy reviews, indexes, directories, more keywords, etc etc etc. The total information content of comp.archives is higher because more people are working on it, and I work less hard at it than before. A second, commercial service provides the same data to its customers, plus adds value of its own to the materials and keeps the database of information as a whole up to date. It retains enough of a copyright on the whole pile of information that it has gathered and created to ensure that it gets credit where credit is due, but allows individual pieces of that collection to be distributed freely as long as the source of the information was acknowleged. I.e. tag on an MSEN Seal of Approval along with the verification information, so that people know what they're getting and who verified it. In summary, please keep your scheme, which is of dubious legality, out of the comp.* hierarchy. I'm a little bit miffed that you're so hostile. Would you prefer that I dropped off the net entirely? -- Edward Vielmetti, moderator, comp.archives emv@msen.com "(6) The Plan shall identify how agencies and departments can collaborate to ... expand efforts to improve, document, and evaluate unclassified public-domain software developed by federally-funded researchers and other software, including federally-funded educational and training software; " "High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, S. 272"