Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!hadron!inco!mack
From: mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: compilation copyright question
Keywords: poster's rights
Message-ID: <4535@inco.UUCP>
Date: 10 Feb 89 16:35:24 GMT
References: <5982@leadsv.UUCP> <5609@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack)
Organization: McDonnell Douglas-INCO, McLean, VA
Lines: 48

In article <5609@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>In article <5982@leadsv.UUCP> webb@leadsv.UUCP (J.J. Webb) writes:
>     Suppose I post a poem, program, funny story, etc. and affix a
>     copyright statement to it.  Now, [somebody compiles something
>     including my work and] declares a compilation copyright [on it].
>     If he/she didn't get my permission, aren't my rights being
>     violated?
>
>Any violation of your rights occurs, if it occurs, when your work is
>copied for inclusion in the collection.  

Not necessarily. It could depend on the phrasing of the statement of
copyright. If I put "Copyright 1989, David W. Mack. All Rights Reserved
Worldwide." at the end of this article, I believe a valid case could
be made for a copyright violation as soon as this posting was
propagated beyond the machines that I myself sent it to. Copying
is inherent in the way Usenet propagates the news. I doubt that
the fact that the administrators of the other machines did not know that
they were transmitting a copyrighted work would be an admissible
defense, any more than the distributor of a diskful of public domain
software claiming he did not know one of the programs on the disk
was copyrighted would be.

If I were trying to defend against such an argument, I believe the
best route would be to assert that the poster knew in advance that
posting implied the creation of copies on machines all over the
world, and had therefore implicitly granted a right to copy which
overrides the embedded copyright notice.

I have no idea whether or not a court would buy this argument.

Assuming that posting to the net constitutes "publication", the main
question that needs to be answered is: what rights does the poster
of an article give up, and which rights does he/she retain? Those
who claim that posting automatically puts the article in the public
domain are claiming that the author gives up all rights by the act
of posting, in which case an editor/compiler/moderator could take
the work and use it in any way he wishes, including selling it for
a profit. If, on the other hand, implied copyright applies, then
the scope of that copyright needs to be determined. If the poster
retains all rights, propagating news articles which don't contain
a specific renunciation of copyright might be found illegal.

Jordan Breslow, are you out there?

-- 
Dave Mack, soon-to-be moderator of news.admin.paranoia
and no, I don't even play one on TV.