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From: PLS@cup.portal.com (Paul L Schauble)
Newsgroups: rec.humor.d,news.admin
Subject: Re: Introduction to REC.HUMOR.FUNNY -- Monthly Posting
Message-ID: <14363@cup.portal.com>
Date: 6 Feb 89 06:47:55 GMT
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Wait a minute!

Before you start flaming Brad, please understand what he is saying. If you're
going to flame him, please do so accurately.

Brad is claiming a compilation or collection copyright. This is NOT the same
thing as claiming copyright on the jokes themselves. A collection copyright
covers the collection as a whole, not the individual items in it. An excellect
example would be a legal publisher who published state laws. They obviously
do not have copyright on the laws themselves, which are public domain. They
do have copyright on the collection as a whole. Another excellent example is
short story collections. The publisher of the collection has a copyright on
the collection, but not on the stories themselves. They stories may be 
published freely, but if someone published exactly the same collection, that
would infringe the collection copyright.

The idea behind this is that the task of selecting the item for the collection
and arranging them is original work that should be protected.

As I read Brad's posting, he intends to use this to prevent a replay of the
recent flap. Any site that objects to the jokes will find themselves off the
distribution. 

I think a direct analogy is that a lot of the software posted in the various
net.sources and net.binaries groups says something like
  Copyright 1988 by J. Random Programmer
  May be freely distributed for non-commercial use as long as no fee is
  charged for the distribution.

This copyright has never provoked objections. As long as Brad is reasonable
about his, I'm inclined to go with it.

  ++PLS