Re: New Copyright Publications of the LII

Francine,

I'd suggest that your student take a look at my copyright FAQ, particularly section 3.8, entitled, "Are Usenet postings and email messages copyrighted?" It gives a pretty good idea of the issues, but it still leaves a lot to be discussed. There are a lot of technical (in a legal sense) issues that I skipped over, since the FAQ is for the general public, not for lawyers and law students. For example, I postulate that usenet has an "implied license" to reproduce postings. There are some problems with that, since a license is a personal contract, and you need two parties. So maybe the act of posting is an "implied offer to license," accepted when the recipient continues to forward the postings en masse. Or perhaps there's not really a license at all, but the act of posting serves as laches or an estoppel to prevent the originator from objecting to further eproduction within the bounds of usenet. All of these theories are (at least to me) interesting and deserve exporation, but are outside the scope of my FAQ.

I would be very interested in whatever your student comes up with, especially if the piece is published (in which case, I'd like to cite to it in my FAQ).

Terry Carroll
Editor-in-Chief, Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. Law Journal and Copyright FAQ Maintainer
<tcarroll[_at_]scuacc.scu.edu> Received on Thu Mar 03 1994 - 20:10:58 GMT