Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcs!mnetor!seismo!gatech!cuae2!ihnp4!houxm!hropus!ka From: ka@hropus.UUCP Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: Policing Ourselves (Was: Re: Followup on "Man of Steel ...) Message-ID: <570@hropus.UUCP> Date: Thu, 17-Jul-86 11:22:49 EDT Article-I.D.: hropus.570 Posted: Thu Jul 17 11:22:49 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 18-Jul-86 06:24:04 EDT References: <308@hp-sdd.UUCP> <4703@sun.uucp> <484@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> <4784@sun.uucp> <122@cascade.ARPA> Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ Lines: 58 Summary: Chuq says that if someone had pulled Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex off the network and published it, Ken and USENET would most likely be responsible. Paul Asente disagrees: > Consider an analagous situation. I make a photocopy of the story for > use in a public speaking class. Someone walks by my desk, sees the copy, > and notices that there's no copyright attached. He therefore assumes it's > public domain and includes it in an anthology. Or imagine I've typed the > story into the computer to do a word analysis for some reason or other. > I print it out and neglect to pick it up; someone else does. Consider some situations which are unambiguous under U. S. copyright law. I see a published story without a copyright notice on it. I am entitled to act on the assumption that the story is not copyrighted until I am informed otherwise. My assumption is reasonable because if the work were not in the public domain it should have been published without a copyright notice. More important from a legal point of view, it is reasonable because Congress said it was reasonable when it wrote the copyright law. If I act on this assumption and the result injures the owner of the copyright on the material, I am not legally responsible for the injury. Instead, the person who published the story without copyrighting it is. Now consider an alternative scenario: I break into an authors house and steal a just completed manuscript from the author's desk. Even if this manuscript does not contain a copyright notice, I am not entitled to act on the assumption that the work is not copyrighted. For me to claim that I was acting in good faith in such a situation would be frankly ludicrous. More specificly, works are born copyrighted--i. e. any work written by the author is copyrighted by him without any action on his part. A copyright notice needs to be added to the work only when it is published. Basicly for this reason, the Congress did not say that an *unpublished* work with- out a copyright notice can be assumed to be in the public domain. It seems to me that the scenarios given by Paul should be evaluated similarly to my latter scenario, although I suppose one could argue about this. The case where a story is posted to the net, on the other hand, is as far as I can see identical to to my first scenario. The only question is whether posting an article to USENET qualifies as publishing it. Given the size of the net, it is hard to see how anyone could claim that there is a difference between posting an article to the net and publishing it. > I don't fault Chuq for notifying Niven; that was a considerate of him > and certainly guaranteed that there would be no further problems. But > I think it was unnecessary. The major issue with respect to the last sentence is whether USENET could be held responsible. USENET per se could not be held responsible because it is not a legal entity, but the corporations that own the machines that make up USENET might be. This falls into a grey legal area. I expect that if anyone actually filed suit against all the companies participating in USENET, most of USENET would be dismantled long before the suit was resolved in court. So the survival of USENET depends less on how the courts might resolve the vageries of legal liability than on whether we make someone mad enough to file suit. Kenneth Almquist ihnp4!houxm!hropus!ka (official name) ihnp4!opus!ka (shorter path)