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From: tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith)
Newsgroups: news.stargate
Subject: Re: ... (and some general opinions)
Message-ID: <6292@ism780c.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 12-May-87 22:16:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: ism780c.6292
Posted: Tue May 12 22:16:51 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 16-May-87 02:40:40 EDT
References: <213200002@mirror> <255@atlas.UUCP> <116@l5comp.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 54

In article <116@l5comp.UUCP> scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner) writes:
<
< 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. 

Not quite.  Compuserve seems to have the attitude that everything
available on CIS is owned by *someone*, and you have to get permission
from that someone before you do anything other than personal use.

For example, if you wanted to redistribute a transcript of a
conference from one of the forums, you would ask the Sysop of
that forum for permission.

If you want to redistribute some software you download, you would
ask the copyright holder of that software.

If there is no other copyright holder to grant permission, than
you have to ask CIS.  If you are using CIS, you probably
agreed to this when you signed your Service Agreement.  It is via
this agreement that they could prevent you from redistributing
public domain stuff you got from them.

There was much misunderstanding caused by the case of a BBS last year
that CIS threatened.  That BBS had an announced policy of calling up
CIS and other commercial services and downloading everything that the
people who ran the BBS thought was interesting.  For a fee you could
join the BBS.  CIS asked Neil Shapiro, the Sysop of the Macintosh
forums to call the BBS and see what they had.  Neil called, and
found several copyrighted works.  He contacted the authors of those
works and found out that the BBS had *NOT* gotten permission from
any of them to sell their works.

Note that the BBS was both violating the copyrights the authors of
the software held, and redistributing stuff on a commercial basis.

CIS's lawyers then dealt with the BBS.  Then people started claiming
all over USENET and in INFOWORLD that CIS was shuting down the BBS
for distributing public domain software.

CIS seems to go to a great deal of effort to protect the rights of
the authors who upload stuff.  For example, I uploaded a desk
accessory I wrote for the Mac ( Maxwell ), which contained notices
all over the place that it was public domain, etc, etc.

CIS decided they wanted to use it on a disk they were putting together
to give to User Groups to promote CIS.  It was public domain.  They
did not need to get my permission.  Not only did they ask me for my
permission, but they gave me $100 of credit on my account. 
-- 
Tim Smith			"Froh wie seine Sonnen fliegen
sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim		 Durch des Himmels praecht'gen Plan,
				 Laufet, Brueder, eure Bahn,
				 Freudig wie ein Held zum Siegen"