From: burley@apple-gunkies.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Craig Burley)
Newsgroups: rec.humor.d
Subject: Re: The Twelve Bugs of Christmas is NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN!!
Date: 19 Dec 92 03:28:06
Organization: Free Software Foundation 545 Tech Square Cambridge, MA 02139
Distribution: rec
	<1992Dec18.225114.6274@desire.wright.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: apple-gunkies.gnu.ai.mit.edu
In-reply-to: dhoeferlin@desire.wright.edu's message of 18 Dec 92 22:51:14 EST

In article <1992Dec18.225114.6274@desire.wright.edu> dhoeferlin@desire.wright.edu writes:

   In article <SCANNELL.92Dec16125150@bubba.ma30.bull.com>, scannell@bubba.ma30.bull.com (P Scannell) writes:
   > The humor piece noted above was posted on rec.humor.funny last year
   > clearly flagged as original material and carrying an appropriate
   > copyright notice.  It was recently REPOSTED on rec.humor.funny 
   > without my knowledge or consent and with the attribution of
   > authorship and the copyright notice stripped away.  Please be
   > advised that this piece is my original work and is NOT NOT NOT
   > in the public domain.
	   I also doubt that you have a legal copyright to the material, or a 
   registered trademark or anything like that.  

I doubt you have more than a tiny amount of knowledge regarding copyright
and trademark laws in the USA, or you wouldn't make a statement like that.
(The "registered trademark" bit really gives it away.)

Try going to a local library and doing some reading about the Berne
Convention, and also skim through a book called something like
"Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks", so you know what you're talking
about in the future.  It's silly to waste net resources otherwise.  (I
was going to email this, but then realized it might actually be useful
for readers of rec.humor.d to know this info.)  FYI, the edition of the
book I read predated, I believe, the USA adopting the Berne Convention,
so it talks about how explicit copyright messages must be present, which
is no longer always required.

There might well be some useful information on the net, but as is obvious
from your post, you can't trust that people who make apparent claim to
knowledge on a subject actually possess any.  That's true for books and
magazines as well, of course, but less so than for the net, where
"publication" is such a cheap and easy thing to do.

FYI, in the USA and other countries covered by the Berne convention, this
very posting is automatically copyrighted by me, its author, even though
I haven't done anything official to so indicate.  Of course, posting it
to USENET grants some (debatable) amount of implicit permission for
thousands of computers to copy it, but it isn't actually legal, from my
own feeble knowledge of the subject (which I admit, hence my suggestion
you all actually _look it up_), for any of you to reproduce it and pass it
off as your own.  (Not that I'd object, I suppose, but then, why would
you want to? :-)

While it is true that posting something you truly want to protect as
copyrightable to rec.humor.funny or anywhere else is likely to be seen
as an _invitation_ by others to copy your work without credit, thus creating
hassle for you, it is _also_ true that, if it's worth the hassle, you
are able to continually serve notice on those who you catch violating
your copyright, and perhaps even sue them for copyright infringement if
they're particularly annoying to you.
--

James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson    burley@gnu.ai.mit.edu
Member of the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) lpf@uunet.uu.net
Newsgroups: rec.humor.d