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From: mcb@lll-tis.arpa (Michael C. Berch)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc,misc.legal
Subject: Re: The Net's Potential in Scholarly Communication
Message-ID: <21633@lll-tis.arpa>
Date: Mon, 3-Aug-87 19:12:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: lll-tis.21633
Posted: Mon Aug  3 19:12:42 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Aug-87 05:43:52 EDT
References: <1069@mind.UUCP>
Reply-To: mcb@lll-tis.arpa (Michael C. Berch)
Followup-To: news.misc
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore CA
Lines: 23
Summary: Permission not need to republish Usenet articles
Xref: mnetor news.admin:793 news.misc:820 misc.legal:2308

In article <1069@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes:
> [With regard to use of Usenet for scholarly conferencing:]
> ...
> I'm continuing to think of ways, though. One possibility might be to
> hard-publish the four or five discussions I've already generated, but that
> would require permissions from all concerned and would entail lots of
> coordination problems. (I've saved all the files though.) 

I have not been following the "Symbol Grounding" discussion which Mr.
Harnad refers to, but would like to point out that Usenet articles
that are posted without copyright notice are in the public domain (at
least according to US law) and permission need not be secured from the 
authors for republication.  It is certainly courteous to do so, 
particularly if the republication is for formal scholarly or 
commercial purposes, but as a strict matter of law it is unnecessary
to do so. The exception, of course, would be articles that bore
copyright notices; a number of these appeared during the initial
controversy over redistribution of Stargate material, but essentially
all have disappeared by now.

Michael C. Berch 
ARPA: mcb@lll-tis.arpa
UUCP: {ames,ihnp4,lll-crg,lll-lcc,mordor}!lll-tis!mcb