🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <PREECE.92Dec3171718@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com>, preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece) writes:
> In article <f5#23s-@rpi.edu> night@acm.rpi.edu (Trip Martin) writes:
> |   Since the US now is a party to the Berne agreement, any document is 
> |   implicitly copyrighted by the author, unless otherwise stated, rather
> |   than being implicitly public domain unless a copyright accompanies it
> |   (which is the way it used to be in the US).  Incidentally, you own the
> |   copy of the document you have, but what exactly that means for email
> |   is pretty fuzzy.
> ---
> Even before we became a party to the Berne convention the question of
> ownership of letters was well resolved.  The author owns the right to
> reproduce them, NOT the recipient (who only owns her own copy).  This
> has been upheld by quite a few court decisions.
> 
> Don't quote unpublished letters without the author's permission; don't
> quote published letters without the copyright holder's permission.

Every once in a while, I'll post a question to some group (comp.lang.c,
rec.travel, whatever).  I'll sometimes get a request from someone via email, 
asking for a copy of all of the answers I received to my original question.
In the past, I thought nothing of putting all of the replies I received in a
file and mailing it out.  My reasoning has been, I am a total stranger to
most, if not all, of the people who helped me and I thought that since they
didn't mind helping me, they wouldn't mind helping some other total
stranger.

Here is an example:  Last year I attended the SUG conference in San Jose.  A
few months before the conference, I posted a request to rec.travel, asking
for info on San Jose and San Fransisco.  I received around 25 replies to my
question.  A few weeks later, a few people asked me to send them a copy of
all of the replies I received.  I thought there was no problem with this and
did so.  Now, am I to understand that this was an illegal/wrong/rude thing to
do??

-- 
David Swanger,   Auburn University, Alabama,   swanger@accs.duc.auburn.edu