Re: who owns newsgroup discussion thread?

From: Lance Purple <lpurple[_at_]netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 12:32:20 -0700 (PDT)

On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Ari Kahan <akahan[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
>
> it shouldn't be necessary to ask an infringer to stop
> infringing; they shouldn't do it in the first place.

But no court has ever ruled that archiving USENET articles is infringement. I would argue DejaNews, Yahoo, Altavista, Zippo, et al. have an implied license to do so, based upon what the average poster expects.

> And, finally, I've had numerous experiences in which I've asked
> Deja News to remove a posting, they do so, and it appears, again,
> a few months later, as they add another source of postings to
> their archive.

Aha. That isn't Deja News's fault; someone out there is running a poorly-maintained news server that spews stale copies of your articles back into the stream.

> And, they run posts even when they contain language that says:
>
> THIS MESSAGE IS COPYRIGHT 1999 ARI KAHAN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. IF
> THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN POSTED TO A NEWSGROUP OR LISTSERV, THE AUTHOR
> DOES NOT INTEND BY SUCH POSTING TO GRANT OR IMPLY ANY RIGHT TO
> RE-DISTRIBUTE THIS MESSAGE, EXCEPT, IN THE CASE OF A LISTSERV, AS
> IS ROUTINELY PERFORMED BY THE LISTSERV MANAGER. IN PARTICULAR, NO
> PERMISSION IS GRANTED TO DEJANEWS, YAHOO, ALTAVISTA, ZIPPO NEWS, OR
> SIMILAR ARCHIVISTS TO ARCHIVE, REDISTRIBUTE, OR REPUBLISH THIS MESSAGE.
Do you honestly think humans read every post? Even if they had a staff of a thousand copyright-checkers, they couldn't keep up. That's why their machines look for the X-No-Archive tag; and I'm sorry to hear it doesn't always catch every last article of yours.  

> > Compare this with a letter to the editor of the New York Times
> > This too is meant to be transitory, dropping off the news
> > stand the next morning; yet it remains archived forever on
> > microfilm at thousands of libraries throughout the world. (And
> > unlike DejaNews, the librarians will -not- gladly remove your
> > letter from the microfilm).
>
> I think it's completely different. Why are you so certain that
> a letter to the New York Times is "meant" to be transitory, when
> everyone knows that the New York Times is retained forever by those
> thousands of libraries?

I think it's -exactly- the same. Posting articles to USENET forums (say rec.arts.woodworking) is like sending a letter to the editor of a periodical covering that topic (Woodworker's Weekly). You've given them an implied license to publish it, and although the initial copy may disappear from the news-stands a few days or months later, it'll be around forever in sufficiently big libraries.

> I think the fact that Deja News hasn't been sued simply means
> that everybody has better things to do, and nobody's suffered
> significant (or, perhaps, any) monetary damage as a result of
> Deja's activities.

They are not causing you any damages, and yet you demand they stop providing an invaluable and free-of-charge public service.

Fine. If need be, we can abandon USENET, and create a parallel hierarchy, where all newsgroups are explicitly chartered to be public-domain only. Posts with angry two-page copyright notices will be summarily thrown in the trash, alongside the sex ads and the get-rich-quick schemes.

BTW: This post is in the public domain.

Lance Purple

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| lpurple at netcom dot com |

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Received on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 19:33:17 GMT