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From: cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,news.groups,news.sysadmin
Subject: The Coming of the Berne Convention
Message-ID: <37625@bbn.COM>
Date: 22 Mar 89 23:27:55 GMT
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: cosell@BBN.COM (Bernie Cosell)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 57

I'm told that the Berne Convention is coming to the US on 1 April.  I've been
trying to understand its implications and I'm having a bit of trouble with
it... but that's my problem...  What I'm concerned about is that there's been
virtually NO commentary here about what impact it will have for usenet.
  [NB: I've let this be "world" distribution, even though this is only really
  a "us" problem because most of you *already* deal with the Berne Convention
  and, perhaps, can help illuminate the issues and problems for us.

I have been lead to believe that the *major* difference for us in the
US with the Berne Convention is that the default for "public domain" is
reversed.  That is, that in the current environment I think it is the
case that if you "publish" something with no copyright, it is in the
public domain, unless and until you make rather spirited efforts at (in
essence) undoing the publishing.  By contrast, ALL published items are
implicitly copyrighted by their authors under the Berne Convention.

(a) Is the fact-of-posting enough to authorize a group's moderator to
    "reprint" a posting?  I assume so.
(b) If you REALLY don't care (as 99+% of us on usenet probably don't), what
    is the Berne-approved method for announcing that something is NOT
    copyrighted?  We've occasionally joked that some folk on the net should
    just stick a "copyright 1989 <ME> all rights reserved" in their
    .signatures and that eliminates WHOLE bunches of questions about where
    your postings can go and what people can do with them.   It is now the
    other way: would it be appropriate to include a "not copyrighted" notice
    in ones .sig??
(c) what is "fair use" in this environment.  If I understand the convention
    properly, if I see something interesting on rec.water.sports, I
    specifically CANNOT forward it to a friend, nor can I repost it to a
    different newsgropu ("bbn.bboard", for example).  What *can* we do?
(d) how will this impact the sources/binaries groups?  I have always 
    presumed that anything that comes in with no notice is "copyright
    free" and I have had no qualms about installing it on my system, or
    sending it to friends, or modifying it (and maybe even reposting
    the "improved" version).  All of this seems like it will become
    marginally-, if not il-, legal with the "implicit copyright" in
    place.   --- mabye the moderators of the binaries/sources groups
    will/should put a "this is in the public domain" notice on their
    shar files as they distribute them (and of course, they''ll have to
    explicitly get that permission from the authors before they can do
    so).
(e) what is the implications for archives?  does posting to a newsgroup imply
    that the poster is giving permission someone the ability to "republish"
    their "work" in any way other than the implicit one (that is, of
    forwarding the particular newsgroup in question around usenet)? 
    Will archive-runners have to make posting-by-posting requests to take
    the (now copyrighted) postings and including them in their "collection"?

I ain't a lawyer, so I'm sure that the turns and twists of sorting this all
out go WAY beyond the simple, obvious problems that just immediately came to
mind.  Anyone thought about that?  Any lawyers in m.l able to give us any
guidance on this?  Anyone worried?

   __
  /  )                              Bernie Cosell
 /--<  _  __  __   o _              BBN Sys & Tech, Cambridge, MA 02238
/___/_(<_/ (_/) )_(_(<_             cosell@bbn.com