Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!lll-lcc!lll-crg!hoptoad!gnu From: gnu@hoptoad.UUCP Newsgroups: news.stargate Subject: Stargate bullshit Message-ID: <1913@hoptoad.uucp> Date: Sat, 21-Mar-87 07:00:33 EST Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1913 Posted: Sat Mar 21 07:00:33 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 22-Mar-87 15:20:15 EST References: <103@stargate.UUCP> <301@gaia.UUCP> <759@looking.UUCP> Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco Lines: 136 [Bear with me, there's an actual proposal at the end.] "The Stargate Project" (i.e. Lauren) had to decide a few years ago whether they wanted to be a post office or a magazine, a phone company or a radio station, e.g. whether they wanted to just carry information for other people, or to organize and "own" and be liable for their information. For some reason, still a mystery to me, he chose the magazine/radio station/ ownership route, even when the lawyer hired by Usenix said that this was the route with worse legal liability. Meanwhile, Stargate has continued to be promoted as a cheaper, better way to do Usenet -- a next generation information network for the folks who currently have Usenet. It is *not* that, and it hasn't intended to be that since the above decision was made. To today's "The Stargate Project", we users are both a source of free information, and a market to sell that information to. We all happily create information, send it to them, they sell it to their subscribers (us) and coerce us into not passing it on for free like we've been doing for years. This is all great except they are charging us both ways -- for phone calls to the stargate hub to post things, and for receiving the info coming back down. And they sit in the middle and control it. I was a strong supporter of the idea that sending the Usenet traffic up and down once could be cheaper than sending it all over the place at phone company rates. That is still probably true. "The Stargate Project" doesn't seem to be doing that though, so I no longer support it. Now, for legal aspects. I'm not a lawyer but I try to keep up with information law. If something is distributed to the public without a copyright notice, it is still owned by the author but they could never collect damages on it in court, so it's effectively public domain. Everyone has the right to use, copy, and redistribute public domain information. Everyone also has the right to choose to not exercise their rights. "The Stargate Project" can sign a contract with its customers, in which Stargate agrees to provide them information and the customer agrees to never use his right to redistribute public domain information received via Stargate. It sounds like this is one approach they are considering. In addition, if "The Stargate Project" actually generates any information, they can copyright it and control it that way in addition to whatever contracts they sign with recipients. Currently, virtually all the information in the Usenet is effectively public domain (as defined above), except occasional source postings containing copyrights. HOWEVER, it is trivial to copyright your postings and at that point "The Stargate Project" no longer has the right to redistribute it -- that right is controlled by you, the author. You can be very arbitrary in who you let do what. As far as I know, use of copyright to enforce a public right to redistribute (as in the copyrights on GNU Emacs and on several peoples postings, including this one) has not been tested in court, but I am willing to finance such a test if someone thinks they can violate the information owners' wishes with impunity. Contact me if your GNU-like copyright has been violated. IF they could distribute your material, they could control what their recipients do with it (with the contract) but you can cut them off before they can even distribute it. If enough people do this, they have to think again about how to make their business survive. Maybe they'll think all the way back to "how about making Usenet both cheaper and higher bandwidth by carrying it as a common carrier". THAT is the point of putting copyright notices in your .signature. (While you are at it, you could remove the disclaimer. They aren't funny any more and there is no need for them. Tim Maroney originated the first Usenet disclaimer while being hassled by the college he has since escaped from. If your management is not hassling you about postings, you don't need it, and the "official" presumption [read mod.announce.newusers] is that you are speaking for yourself.) In article <759@looking.UUCP>, brad@looking.UUCP writes: > It seems perfectly fair that Stargate and the LA customer could enter into > a contract that says, > "I will move the information you request from Atlanta to you, so long as > you pay me and don't resell (or give away) this moving." > Perhaps some are suggesting that this sort of contract be illegal... No, I am suggesting that this kind of contract is not in the best interest of all the people in the Usenet, and we should therefore not make our information available to vultures who operate under those rules. Put another way, why should Stargate restrict distribution on data moved from Atlanta to LA, when gatech and ihnp4 and sdcrdcf and hoptoad and decwrl move it and don't restrict it? Now, the whole backbone could desert to 'encourage' us to sign up for Stargate, but if the FCC doesn't manage to kill PC Pursuit, we can set up another backbone in short order. > If you wish to make such a contract illegal, you will seriously hurt > the economies of such telecommunications. Nobody here is talking about passing laws, which is the only way to make things illegal. > Any customer for telecommunications > of PD information will have to be charged enough to pay for telecommunications > to EVERYBODY in their nearby region. This would wreck the industry. I thought the original idea of Stargate was that indeed, once you have paid to move it to anybody, you *have* paid to move it to everybody. That if we chipped in together the way we've been doing moving it all around on phone lines, we could get better service for cheaper. It doesn't cost "The Stargate Project" any more to supply the information to a million sites than it does to supply it to ten sites. What costs more is all the administrative bullshit required to make all million of them pay for it. The original goals of the project have gotten lost in the accounting. If "The Stargate Project" said "we are now beginning transmission of the entire unedited Usenet feed, here is where you can buy decoders, pass it on like you do now, please send us 1/10th of the money you save on phone bills, honor system" would it survive or not? I don't know, but I prefer that experiment (which is what I thought we were doing here) to a "BYTE magazine of the airwaves", with Mark Horton as Jerry Pournelle, Lauren Weinstein as Steve Ciarcia, and remember, all you BIX subscribers, we charge you to log in and then we sell your words... -- (C) Copyr 1987 John Gilmore; you can redistribute only if your recipients can. (This is an effort to bend Stargate to work with Usenet, not against it.) {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4,ucbvax}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@ingres.berkeley.edu