From: hartman@ulogic.UUCP (Richard M. Hartman)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Copyrights on netnews articles
Date: 31 Jul 92 00:23:45 GMT
Organization: negligable

In article <1992Jul28.003305.14528@gtephx.UUCP> forda@gtephx.UUCP (Andrew Ford @ AGCS, Phoenix, Arizona) writes:
>For the third of fourth time, (and no-one has countered this 
>yet) read the usenet primer from news.announce.newuser -- it 
>tells you point blank that what you post here is in the public 
>domain unless you copyright it.

Wrong.  This has been countered at least twice that I have
seen (once in this thread and once in another).  And ignored (by you).

The FAQ referred to:

	1) states it's opinion (not conclusion) as "*probably*"
	   (emphasis the author's) and explicitly states that 
	   it may have to be settled by the courts.

	2) was written before the adoption of the Berne convention
	   by the US.  meaning that at the time the FAQ was written
	   a copyright notice was required to *keep* your rights.
	   After the adoption of the Berne convention, a notice
	   was only required in order to grant exeptions to the
	   basic reserved rights. 

	3) is not a binding contract by some USENET representative,
	   it is an opinion by one person who wanted to give new
	   people some sort of orientation information.

>The law may be different, but when you voluntarily participate
>in a public forum, you agree to the rules.  The monthly
>postings to news.announce.newuser contain the guidelines and
>rules which your presence here agrees to.

The guidelines contain guidelines, nothing more.

>Those postings also tell you that you cannot control where your
>posts go on usenet: so ridiculous little attempts to do so in
>your .sig carry no weight as your presence here indicates your
>agreement to the rules imposed by the owners of the equipment
>which you are using.

This I would have to agree with.  However, the basic idea that
posting an article amounts to releasing it to the public domain
has nothing to do with this.  Posting an article starts an
automated process by which copies of that article are sent from
machine to machine around the world.  The act of posting is
(or should be) permission to do so.  The behavior of the news
software also implies permission for copies to be made for
purposes of replying to the articles (as I have done here
with your article).  It seems reasonable that copies may be
made for personal use (trn does have an 's' save command...).
There would seem to be no point in not allowing such copies
to be printed and posted on office walls, sent to friends
through the mail, archived on tape, etc.

What is *not* implied in the act of posting an article is that
someone can take that article and then sell it to a third party
as his own work.  What is unclear is whether someone can take
a copy of the News archive and sell it as a "collected work"
without violating the copyright automatically granted by
the Berne convention.


		-Richard Hartman
		hartman@uLogic.COM

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Extensive studies have shown that 93% of all statistics are meaningless.

Xref: sparky news.admin:6352 comp.org.eff.talk:4993