From: dunnett@mala.bc.ca (Malcolm Dunnett)
Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,misc.legal.computing
Subject: Re: NetNews/CD - USENET News Available
Date: 22 Jul 92 14:40:23 -0700
Organization: Malaspina College

In article <23272@alice.att.com>, 
    jj@alice.att.com (jj@alice.att.com, curmudgeon) writes:

>
> Oh, really?  Copying an entire work without explicit permission,
> away from the medium it started in is "fair use".  Not by any
> scale that has EVER been proposed by anyone who wanted to
> stay in business.  
> 
   I guess this all revolves around whether you consider ( or more
correctly whether the courts in a particular jurisdiction ) consider
usenet to be a "publishing medium" or a "public forum". It also may
depend on what the "medium" is defined as being - is it written somewhere
that usenet consists only of screen images on bulletin boards or the like--
exactly what is your definition of usenet, and can you demonstrate that it
covers all transmission and display methods which have been accepted
throughout the history of the net. I gather from your last response that
the article which was published didn't have any restrictive notice in it,
if this is so then if the publisher had reproduced it in its entirety
he could have been justified in believing that printing it was within the
spirit in which it was given to the net community and thus he had the same
implicit permission all usenet sites have ( unless there is a legally
accepted definition of which media usenet comprises I don't know how you can
categorically declare that paper is not included ). It appears the article
was not complete, and I think you indicated your were not given credit as
the originator ( you said the headers and signature were not included, you
didn't indicate if you were credited in some other way ), in this case
his actions are unethical in any context.

> By your argument, a newspaper column that's widely distributed could
> be copied into more newspapers because it's "already present in
> many copies".

  If this hypothetical newspaper operated by printing a given number of
copies, which were distributed to other printing sites, who were given
permission to print as many copies as they saw fit ( with no requirement
that they notify the originator they had done so ), and they were allowed
to further distribute these copies to other printing sites, who could 
repeat the process - and the columnist neither knew or cared how often
this process was repeated, then I would wonder why he would get upset over
a particular copy or set of copies of his work, yet ignore the uncounted
number of copies others had generated.

>                Your argument is simply blind both to the law
> and to the idea of intellectual property and the rights of the
> property owners.

    Not to mention being contrary to the pursuit of truth, justice and
liberty :-). Actually I initially agreed that the publisher of your article
had stepped way over the line, but the more I thought about it the harder
time I had reconcilling your initial act of giving the information freely
to the usenet community [without having any concrete idea of the size or
membership of said community] with (presumably) no expectation of
remuneration and your concern that someone had decided to assist in its
dissemination ( ie you would be happy, or at least not care, if I
replicated it onto 1000 computers for people to read, but concerned if I
did the same thing into 1000 magazines or CD-ROMs). There is a good chance
that you have a legal right to make such a condition ( until actual case
law is available we won't know for sure ). You certainly have a
moral right to impose these conditions - and I would not advocate anyone
knowingly contravening them. But I don't understand why you give the
information freely to everyone who has "free" access to usenet, but deny it
to everyone who doesn't have the same access to the government subsidies
and the like that make usenet "free" for some of us. 

-- 
========================================================================
Malcolm Dunnett    Malaspina College         Email: dunnett@mala.bc.ca
Computer Services  Nanaimo, B.C. CANADA        Tel: (604)755-8738
Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,misc.legal.computing