🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun21.074613.10883@agate.berkeley.edu> adam@soda.berkeley.edu (Adam J. Richter) writes:

	   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.

Your encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the NSFNet is most
welcomed.  I trust that you are also reading the com-priv mailing
list, which deals with the commercialization and privatization of the
Internet; those archives are kept at uu.psi.com:/archives/com-priv/*
for your further entertainment.  

   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.  

Your encyclopedic knowledge of the law is also highly regarded.  I'd
recommend browsing through the Computer Underground Digest archives
that Brendan Kehoe maintains on ftp.cs.widener.edu:/pub/cud/, in
particular the "networks" and "law" directories there.

   I suspect that what would happen would be that
   comp.archives would simply not be carried on NSFNet.

Should that be a matter of concern to us, we would deal with it as the
matter arose.

	   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.  

Absolutely.  And people who are getting them shouldn't pass them along
to their neighbors unless their neighbors are properly authorized to
carry them, and they shouldn't be transmitted over networks which have
restrictive usage policies.  At worst you might have to make long
distance phone calls direct back to the source of the information.

	   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.  

I agree that it is going to be important to keep things on the up and
up, and to pay attention to the intellectual property rights of
everyone involved.  That's why it would be ideal if the work were
funded by some entity which wouldn't assert any additional rights over
the work, they'd just give it away for free.  

Consider the following prospect.  comp.archives continues on much as
it is today, except that articles don't have any additional
information added to them when I repost them, and I don't necessarily
go to all of the trouble of verifying location information.  Other
comp.archives contributors add location information, snappy reviews,
indexes, directories, more keywords, etc etc etc.  The total
information content of comp.archives is higher because more people are
working on it, and I work less hard at it than before. 

A second, commercial service provides the same data to its customers,
plus adds value of its own to the materials and keeps the database of
information as a whole up to date.  It retains enough of a copyright
on the whole pile of information that it has gathered and created to
ensure that it gets credit where credit is due, but allows individual
pieces of that collection to be distributed freely as long as the
source of the information was acknowleged.  I.e. tag on an MSEN Seal
of Approval along with the verification information, so that people
know what they're getting and who verified it.

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

I'm a little bit miffed that you're so hostile.  Would you prefer that
I dropped off the net entirely?

-- 
Edward Vielmetti, moderator, comp.archives			emv@msen.com

"(6) The Plan shall identify how agencies and departments can
collaborate to ... expand efforts to improve, document, and evaluate
unclassified public-domain software developed by federally-funded
researchers and other software, including federally-funded educational
and training software; "
			"High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, S. 272"