Re: New Copyright Publications of the LII

At 7:15 PM 2/24/94 -0500, Michael S. Hines wrote:
>I am under the impression that any material I submit to the Internet
>or any net is copyright by myself barring any other agreements to the
>contrary.
>
>Am I missing something?

Yes...

Certainly what you write and post is copyrighted by you. The problem comes by defining what "posting" means. You post something to this email list. It seems clear who that message will go to, right?

Wrong. It might go to 500 people, but it might also go to a few dozen re-mailers or newsgroups on a few dozen sites. Or, a few dozen people might manually forward interesting posts to a few dozen people each.

The point is that once you post something to a public list, it is copyrighted, but so what... its distribution list could be ever expanding -- and then we start to consider archiving... or simply placing all posts from this list onto a CD-ROM for those "subscribers" who don't have email... All of these are nothing more than extensions to the distribution list in different electronic forms.

It is not the copyrighting of our posts that's the issue, it's what happens after the post goes out the door that's the issue.

---
Glenn Tenney
tenney[_at_]netcom.com   Amateur radio: AA6ER
(415) 574-3420      Fax: (415) 574-0546