🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <EMV.91Jun19020107@bronte.aa.ox.com> emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti) writes:
>in the near future, postings to comp.archives are going to be tagged
>with an explicit copyright notice.  this is a step in the direction of
>making this service fully self-supporting, with enough resources
>readily available to the project so that I can afford to keep it
>going.  as i posted in an article to comp.archives a few months ago,
>unless my work on this starts to yield some results, i'm going to stop
>distributing my efforts far and wide for free.  free distribution of
>comp.archives is currently expected to continue to the end of the
>year; if things haven't worked their way out to my satisfaction, i
>expect to step down from moderating comp.archives some time not too
>long after the winter Usenix meeting.  no specific dates set yet.

	If you want to produce a copyrighted newsgroup, then please don't
use a newsgroup in a hierarchy that is normally propogated over NSFNet and
BARRNet, which prohibit most forms of commercial usage.  Such a blatant and
willful violation of the Interim NSFNet Acceptable Use Policy, apparently
with the complete knowledge and sanction of your company, is unprecedented
in the history of the NSFNet, to the best of my knowledge.  I don't know
if the folks at NSF could do more than threaten to disconnect sites that
transmit comp.archives over NSFNet, or if you could be prosecuted for
whatever laws exist to make it illegal to make unauthorized use of other
people's computer equipement (such as the NSFNet backbone), or, for that
matter, if the law is any different when the computers that you are
misusing are owned by the federal government.  I suspect that what would
happen would be that comp.archives would simply not be carried on NSFNet.

	This is not to say that copyrighted newsgroups are a bad thing,
but that they should be transmitted by permission of those who carry
them.  You might want to try your scheme on the biz.* hierarcy or
do something in conjunction with ClariNet, or make some other arrangement
so that the intermediary sites that carry your copyrighted newsgroup to
your cusomters could recover the costs that they bear from your commercial
use of their resources.

	I doubt that you can actually copyright other people's postings
without their consent any more than I can scratch out a copyright notice
on a book and replace it with my own.  I wonder if you'd be in violation
of any laws regarding copyright and fraud.  I wonder if you and your
company could be sued by the original authors of the postings or by
anybody else who was effected by your copyright notices.  

	In summary, please keep your scheme, which is of dubious legality,
out of the comp.* hierarchy.

Adam J. Richter			adam@soda.berkeley.edu
409 Evelyn Avenue, Apt. 312	....!ucbvax!soda!adam
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