From: peterd@cc.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
Subject: Theft of services, NOT! (was Re: Net ...)
Organization: Bunyip Information Systems (the archie people)
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 16:26:39 GMT

[* STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN! ARRRRGGGHHHH!!!! *]

To late, I'm posting but isn't this all getting _sooo_
tedious? :-)


In article <1992Jul30.213744.2681@blaze.cs.jhu.edu> bogstad@blaze.cs.jhu.edu (Bill Bogstad) writes:
>In article <157crjINNbl9@smaug.West.Sun.COM> dab@ism.isc.com (David A. Butterfield) writes:
>>forda@gtephx.UUCP (Andrew Ford @ AGCS, Phoenix, Arizona) writes:
>>>The "Usenet Primer" contains terms and conditions
>>>which apply to your use of the net.
>>
>>Heh.  Exactly who do you imagine to be party to this unsigned
>>"contract" you declare to exist?  Good luck getting a judge to
>>enforce a "contract" that was never agreed to, and whose terms
>>have been explicitly rejected.
>
>	Does this mean that I have a theat of services suit against you for
>use of "my" machine to distribute your article?  (Or likewise, you have the
>same against me for this article.)

Actually, even if there were some merit in this argument,
it would seem that the only people you could complain
about in terms of theft of services (presumably for
occupying your disk space and using your CPU cycles) would
be the actual machines that you exchange news articles
with. It may be that the stuff they "put on your disk"
comes from my site, but _I_ didn't put them there, unless
you and I exchange news directly.

Now, is it theft of services? Since you have authorized
such machines to pass you stuff I don't see where your
claim is arisning from. If we have agreed to exchange 47
byte packets of NULLs, and we then do so, where's your
beef? And from the way the software is constructed, I
thought you can't start exchanging messages with a another
site unless _you_ agree to do so by configuring your
software.

Note that this has nothing to do with the copyright issue
(thank God!). If you claim theft of services then some
theft of services must have been done and I don't see that
here.

>	Bottom Line: What implicit copying rights (if any) does a poster
>give me (as administrator of a news site) in return for use of my machine?

To me this question only makes sense in terms of asking
about your relationship with your immediate newsfeeds.
These are the people supplying you with articles which go
onto your disk. Since this is something you have to
enable, presumably you are granting such sites the right
to send you stuff. Of course, you can always refuse to
accept something simply by turning off access. End of
story.

Now, since the words "copying" and "rights" appeared to
gether above, let's think about copyright for just a
moment longer <AARRGGHHH!!>

Obviously the site feeding me articles may send me
material for which proper copyright authorization has not
been obtained (the simplest example is when someone posts
something to which they don't own the copyright. At this
point nothing they or you do can convert that into a
public domain posting, and I trust no one would argue that
this can happen?).

Now, what does this mean? In the context of _your_ theft of
services suit, nothing. I think I've established that
you've granted the feeder site access to your disk so your
case was already dismissed as groundless.

In the context of the potential copyright suit against
_you_, I'd suggest you argue that you didn't violate
copyright since someone else commanded that posting to
come to your site (your feed would argue the same thing in
a chain of buck-passing back to the originating site and
to the original poster). There's the person who violated
copyright and the person who will, if we live in a sane
world (not a given) pay the piper. You in effect claim
"common carrier" status as a transport mechanism. Provided
you act quickly to delete or quarantine messages when
advised of problems I should think you'd be in the clear.

>If the answer is none, then I can conceivably sue every site on the net for
>forwarding this message.

I don't see that this follows at all, which is a dangerous
sign that we're about to do to the theft of services
argument what we did to the copyright argument. <Sigh>

Why would you be able to sue "every site" just because
your neighbor copied a file to your machine? Your claim
does not seem to involve the _content_ of the message,
which is the only contribution to the fracas that I might
have made and you've obviously got your neighbor's
sitename in your config files or he couldn't have sent you
the message. 

It would seem to me that taking your argument is designed
to frighten us with the potential for unlimited lawsuits
to pursuade us not to pursue our claims for copyright.
Sorry, it doesn't wash...


				- peterd
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