From: news@wolves.uucp (The Wolfe of the Den)
Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.org.eff.talk,misc.legal.computing
Subject: Re: Copyrights on netnews articles - history
Summary: more refinements to the model
Date: 27 Jul 92 03:09:42 GMT
Reply-To: news@wolves.durham.nc.us
Organization: Wolves Den UNIX
X-Md4-Signature: c7036c11ffbad08c1cdbce939a1e0558

In <1992Jul24.192716.2099@jlc.mv.com> john@jlc.mv.com (John Leslie) writes:
>
>   I'd bet that this question came up as NetNews was being designed --
>our predecessors seem to have thought most things through pretty well.  
>But I'm not sure I agree with the omission.  If there were a clearly
>defined way to express your wish that your article NOT be placed on CD,
>then people could use it and CD pressers could honor it; and we might
>be spared a pile of court cases which seem pretty pointless to me.

	The question *did* come up in the design of the net and in the
development of the RFC's for news.  At that point in time, the USA was
not a Berne Convention country, and to assert copyright required
explicit notice.  Some of the earliest flame-wars were over situations
where authors' placed copyright notices on their works and some sites
then proceeded to lock out any further items from that person.

	This was the whole point of my long article about Net Culture
Assumptions.  (Annotated copies available via email :-)

	The assumption was/is that the poster wants folks to read and
pass on the item, and certain aspects of the control provided by
copyright were "looked over" in order to further communications.

	The USA's adoption of the Berne Convention rules changed the
situation overnight.  As the edges of "the net" get more and more fuzzy,
the limitations of copyright get similarly fuzzy.

	In my opinion, it is a "hostile" act to place an explicit
copyright notice on an item posted to the net (unless it is a case of
posting a copyrighted work with permission.)   The author is in effect
saying "I'm going to ues your machine to publish this article on 'the
net' but if I don't feel like it, I'm not going to give you a copy of
the article for your own use."

	Yes, I've adopted some part of Brad and Mathew's viewpoints,
since it greatly simplifies the argument of who is responsible when a
poster violates someone else's copyright.

	I still see the basic assumption that the poster want the
readers to see and respond to the item, and in exchange for the use of
the resources granted by the site owner/admin to his use (via the net)
the poster is giving the site a copy of the item (given that it is the
posters work to "give".)

	JJ and others adding copyright notices to their items are
telling the folks at certain types and classes of sites that they are
NOT welcome to have a copy, even though these sites are giving them the
use of their resources to distribute the articles.

	If I were the owner/admin of a "deep pocket" site, I'd probably
feel it necessary to either get a blanket authorization from them for
the use of their articles, or write a filter for the incoming feeds to
kill their items before placing them in the article tree (and probably
before batching them to other sites, since I wouldn't want to re-write
the news software to batch them without locally filing a copy.)

	As I see it, Brad's model still doesn't quite deal with the
concept that the site or reader can archive a copy of the article,
unless the poster "gives" the site or each reader a copy of the item.
At some point, a copy of the item has to pass into the hands of the
reader who is filing the article for whatever reason.
-- 
Usenet Net News Administrator @ The Wolves Den  (G. Wolfe Woodbury)
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