response 1 of 26:

Nov 17 14:18 UTC 2002

I think we just had a version of this debate when we were discussing
whether people can censor their old responses.  The authors of the
postings in your conference have copyrights on their postings.  To
reproduce them someplace else, you need their permission.

So, to do this legally, you'd need permissions from all the people who
authored responses that you move.

Technically, make a copy of the conference directory from M-Net.  You
only need the item files, with names like _23.  Edit those files,
removing responses from anyone who has not given you permission to copy
it over.  Then talk the Grex cfadm into installing those item files in a
Grex conference directory.  I have no idea how friendly cfadm will be to
that idea, but I suppose they'd be willing.

response 3 of 26:

Nov 18 02:57 UTC 2002

Copyright and ownership is a very vague area which is evolving rapidly.
Jan describes the "individual ownership" case in #1, but one could
instead make a "collective ownership" case in which response is part of
a whole which is collectively owned, and that claiming copyright on one
response makes no more sense than, say, Gilbert and Sullivan attempting
to claim separate copyrights over each half of a G&S production (& it's
most certainly true the two were pretty contentious, and one could
separate out the words and music...).

In this particular case, however, the matter is quite clear; m-net has a
stated policy on copyright, and given past history, I don't think we'd
want to even consider importing anything from m-net without a signed
release from m-net's management and *all* of the people contributing
text to the conference in question.  That in itself creats a new
problem: I suspect at least some of the people involed wish to remain
anonymous: how do you collect a legal signature from an electronic
identity which has no attached full legal name?

response 9 of 26:

Nov 18 12:51 UTC 2002

Re #7:  None of which are relevant to the polytarp.cf, and you've made a
         mistake there as well.

response 11 of 26:

Nov 18 13:40 UTC 2002

forget

response 13 of 26:

Nov 18 15:16 UTC 2002

I say we let polytarp and jp2 duke out the copyright issues.  That will
be more interesting than the actual conference would be.

response 15 of 26:

Nov 18 20:25 UTC 2002

12; No fucking way.

13; No fucking way.

response 17 of 26:

Nov 19 12:57 UTC 2002

Here's what i see as the current state of the issues on this:

Copyright - lots of lawyers are saying cool things.  The fact that Joe
Newuser could copy & paste text from M-Net's polytarp cf. into Grex's
polytarp cf. is one reality check here; another is that we could delete
if anyone objected and that, unlike talk, serious legal action against
Grex wouldn't be very cheap.

User names/numbers - if we prefix all user names with "mnet-" and change
all user numbers to something obscure, would both Picospan & Backtalk be
happy?

Representation - i'm inclined to say that all transplanted items would
need to have a disclaimer inserted, identifying their origin.

Effort - how many items & responses are you hoping to transfer, polytarp?

response 19 of 26:

Nov 19 17:41 UTC 2002

This one came up, so here's a rant: neither Grex nor M-Net will ever have
a hope in hell of arguing a collection copyright on their conferences or
items.  Drop the argument; it's silly.

You're exerting as much creativity as Ameritech does when it compiles a
phone book.  All you're doing is giving people a place to enter stuff.
You aren't exerting any creative control.  You aren't soliciting and
arranging submissions like an anthologist does.  You aren't even editing
people's stuff.  You're in the same position the phone companies are, and
it's settled law that they don't hold a copyright on phone directories.
The key is creativity, not effort, and Grex -- the corporation -- doesn't
make any creative contribution to its conferences.

response 21 of 26:

Nov 19 19:03 UTC 2002

That wasn't how they decided the phone book case, though, so it doesn't
matter.  The phone book case was decided on the fact that creativity is
required for copyright; "sweat of the brow" is, by law, not enough.

The phone company didn't exercise any creativity; it just put names in
alphabetical order, so it doesn't get a copyright.

Same with Grex or M-Net: they just store the responses as users enter
them.  No creativity, no copyright.

Look it up.

response 23 of 26:

Nov 20 05:10 UTC 2002

How does she feel about that?