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From: scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner)
Newsgroups: news.stargate
Subject: Re: ... (and some general opinions)
Message-ID: <116@l5comp.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 10-May-87 07:28:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: l5comp.116
Posted: Sun May 10 07:28:53 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 13-May-87 01:30:23 EDT
References: <213200002@mirror> <255@atlas.UUCP>
Reply-To: scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner)
Organization: L5 Computing, Edmonds, WA
Lines: 33
Summary: Censorship revisted along with the copyright issue.

In article <255@atlas.UUCP> spietrow@atlas.UUCP (Steve Pietrowicz) writes:
>One sysop in particular on CompuServe deletes notices that have anything to
>do with competing services.  In fact, some postings that I put on CompuServe
I recently had the chance to watch CIS in action in such a case. They zapped
some messages dealing with another service. The sysop in question was then
confronted about it. Public messages dealing with this confrontation were
then deleted as well. The sysop replied via private e-mail that the messages
hadn't been deleted, but rather had been removed from public view :-). Things
got rather childish after that so I won't go any further...

As for censorship, it IS rampant on most services. Both CIS and GEnie have
active censorship policies.

More bothersome is that most of these services have active policies for
restricting distribution of their contents. Some are even going so far as to
claim a copyright on works without valid copyrights by their authors. This
is insidious since most authors don't seem to understand how copyrighting
works. Statements like "This work is Copywrite 1987 by" appear more than you
might think! The reason for this policy is that if the work is copyrighted by
the author they make no restrictions on it other than those imposed by the
author. But if the SERVICE claims the copyright you're lucky if you can print
it on your printer without being in "violation" of the service's copyright.

Usenet is probably the largest network in the world that doesn't attempt to
restrict what it's users can do with the material they download.

Scott Turner


-- 
L5 Computing, the home of Merlin, Arthur, Excalibur and the CRAM.
GEnie: JST | UUCP: stride!l5comp!scotty | 12311 Maplewood Ave; Edmonds WA 98020
If Motorola had wanted us to use BPTR's they'd have built in shifts on A regs
[ BCPL? Just say *NO*! ] (I don't smoke, send flames to /dev/null)