response 51 of 112:

Aug 10 06:31 UTC 1996

In your usage, the correct word is "web-surfer".

Excuse me, did you say that some Grex conferences contain confidential
material? I definitely didn't follow that. Things are posted on Grex
specifically so that other people will see them. That is Grex's function.

response 53 of 112:

Aug 10 13:04 UTC 1996

Hmm, I'm not sure I understand the difference.

With my proposal, people with web access could click on a link
on Grex's home page and be able to read items in the Intro
conference without having to have an account on Grex. Since
there's concern about it, I'd set it up so that the items would
not be indexed by webcrawlers. Since items in the Intro
conference are retired quickly, they would not be web-accessible
for very long.

With Backtalk, people with web access could click on a link on
Grex's home page and be able to read every item in every public
conference on Grex, without having to have an account on Grex,
including items that have been around for years. These items
would be web-accessible for long periods of time, although they
would not be indexed by webcrawlers.

I don't see why people have problems with my proposal but think
Backtalk is okay.

response 55 of 112:

Aug 10 16:41 UTC 1996

Under current copyright law, everything you write is copyrighted
by you the instant that you write it down, whatever the medium,
so there is already an automatic copyright in effect. The work
does not have to be registered with any official body in order
to be protected by copyright, nor does it have to have a copy-
right notice on it, although violation of copyright is easier
to prove if it is registered, and I believe the penalties for
copyright violation in that case are stiffer as well.

So if brighn, jenna, or remmers posts, say, one of their own
poems in the poetry conference, then brighn, jenna, or remmers
holds a copyright on that poem. In particular, it is illegal
*now* for someone to copy the poem and make it available to
others -- even if they're not trying to make money off of
it -- without the explicit permission of brighn, jenna, or
remmers.

response 57 of 112:

Aug 10 19:46 UTC 1996

What does "copy" mean, in this instance?  Am I copying remmers'
poem when I display it on my screen?  When I print in on my
printer?  When I print it on my printer, read it immediately,
then destroy the printout?  How about if I save the poem to either a 
computer file (on Grex) to read it later without having to find
it in a specific conference?  How about if I print it out so that
someone who doesn't have computer access can read it?  Is it copying
a poem without permission if an item containing a poem in poetry
is linked to enigma?  

Someone, quick, ask Jenna's daddy's lawyer. ;-)


  

response 59 of 112:

Aug 11 01:41 UTC 1996

About copying rights, Mary>  When you receive a copyrighted document, either
free or through purchase, you are generally allowed to make as many copies
for personal usage as you please.  The problem comes when you want to
distribute it to friends.  Let's say you loved a poem of mine from the poetry
conference, so much so that you wanted a copy of it in every book in your
library (pretty obsessive, eh?).  You're pretty much allowed to print off that
many copies.  If you wanted to show it to friends, that's fine.  If you wanted
to *give* it to friends, copyright law looks a bit askance at you.  And you
certainly can't *sell* it to friends (or to strangers, for that matter).  The
problem is, copyright in electronic media is still a new frontier, and I'm
not sure Grex really wants to be on the legal cutting edge here.  OTOH, Grex
can't afford lawyers, and my advice would be to err to the side of caution.

The assumption that a few of you have made is that this sort of thing doesn't
go on in the world of paper ("Grex is more like a kiosk than Random House
Publishers").  The average student can tell you how many (illegally) xeroxed
short stories and poems they get in composition classes... Kinko's (a major
photocopy shop, for those who don't know) has instituted a literal legal mess
of hurdles to prevent copyright infringement for college course packets (due
for the most part to a series of major lawsuits from academic presses)...
Getting my poems published in anthologies and such, I run the same risk as
I do posting them here (greater, actually, IMHO, because on electronic
systems, folks are likely to download and upload files whole cloth, and hence
would more consistently include author credits, while photocopies often leave
off the author... in poetry anthologies for instance, if there are ten poems
by the same poet, the poet's name will appear on a preface page or biography
page, and not on the same pages as the poems, so when they're duplicated, the
names get left off).  Honestly, I get the feeling y'all think I'm more naive
than I am.  I know the Evil the Net does.  It's rarely worse than the Evil
of the Paper World.

The recurrent point is this (now moot, IMHO):  Random House, or the Detroit
Free Press, doesn't generally or legally go off publishing their authors'
stuff wherever they please unless a contract stipulates they can.  Grex, or
CCI, shouldn't either.  Somewhere up there says that everything on here is
covered by Grex copyright, and I'm glad John implicitly corrected that.  *I*
own the copyright to the materials I post on Grex, not Grex, until I
explicitly or implicitly transfer those rights.  I have not so transferred
them.  

Copying a file counts as an act of publishing.  Making a file accessible by
a wider audience doesn't.

response 61 of 112:

Aug 11 02:33 UTC 1996

Remmers's explanation of copyright ownership thoroughly agrees with my 
understanding. Furthermore, I agree with most of Brighn's comments
(although I have seen a lot of humor passed around on the net without
attribution that would much more likely be present on paper, so I
think that electronic form may be worse than paper for abuse, but that's
a quibble).

Grex does not own the copyright to anything posted here, but rather the rights
are owned by the authors themselves. Not everything posted on Grex is 
original, though. The copyright is owned by the *original* author.
Posting it on Grex conveys nothing toward establishing your copyright.

One important thing that has not been mentioned here is the implicit 
granting of nonexclusive rights to Grex to make this material
available to those who access Grex. I say that the granting of this right is
implicit, because there is no signed contract, nor even a posted statement
that legally you are granting this right by posting here.

Nevertheless, in my considered opinion, because this is and has always been 
a BBS whose entire purpose is to make this material available to others,
and because there simply is no other reason to post anything in any 
public conference on Grex except to make it available to others on Grex, 
you are granting the (nonexclusive) right to Grex to make it available. 

Of course this is only my opinion. 

response 63 of 112:

Aug 11 06:43 UTC 1996

I think there are situations where Grex could misuse people's writings.  For
instance:

   - If we included one of brighn's poems in a paper "Grex Newsletter"
     without permission.
   - If we linked one of brighn's poems into the "Juvenile NAZI Poetry
     Conference".
   - If we started collecting fees from people to read the contents of
     the poetry conference.
   - If we introduced an interface that displays brighn's poems without
     showing his name.

All of these are rude and disrespectful.  I'm not sure which, if any are
illegal.  When you publish material in very public forums, you tend to yield
many of your copyright rights.  When you've posted something on Grex, you've
made it available, free of charge, to everyone on earth.  I'm not sure, but
I seem to remember doing things like that tends to undermine your copyright
protection.

Whatever the law says, we certainly want to be polite to people, but we should
not be fostering the notion that stuff posted on Grex is only accessible to
a small exclusive group.  That's just illusionary and counterfactual.

Incidentally, a copyright is not violated everytime something is copied.
For instance, Grex can quite legally make backup tapes of conferences
containing copyrighted material.  Also the fact that John's program involves
making a copy before displaying it, and Backtalk generates the Web display
directly from the "original" is of no legal significance at all.

response 65 of 112:

Aug 11 18:43 UTC 1996

Heh.  Yeah, it's illegal to use copywritten materials for unauthorized
monetary gain, but that's not an issue here.  Grex's purpose in looking for
more users is not to increase the amount of money we have.  In fact, the more
users we get the more money it takes to run the system, and the smaller the
percentage of our users who donate money gets.  Still, I suppose that for
those who do donate money, finding interesting content here is probably a
prime reason.  If brighn really feels so strongly that his posts are the
reasons that people donate money to Grex rather than being freeloaders like
him, and that the things he writes should absolutely not be used to steer
people away from the one true path of freeloading, then I'm not sure why he
keeps posting stuff here.

Really, I don't see the slightest legal difference between PicoSpan, BackTalk,
and remmers' web posting program.  All three get the things said by our users
out in a place where other people can see them (in other words, exchanging
ideas, one of the main purposes of Grex).  It really doesn't make sense to
keep posting things on a public access conferencing system only to threaten
to sue us if we let other people read the stuff you say.

response 67 of 112:

Aug 11 21:37 UTC 1996

Monetary gain has little to do with copyright. The copyright owner may
deny the right of someone to copy the material, even if there is *no*
gain to be made.  However, by putting your material on Grex, you are de 
facto granting the authority of Grex to permit others to see it. In order 
to do this, Grex makes intermediate copies (in the form of packets) and 
ships these copies to the viewer.  None of this appears to me to be in the
least way suspect, from a legal point of view.

Whether this is done with an extra intermediate copy on disk seems 
irrelevant to me as well. I do not think Backtalk is any different than 
Remmers's program from the point of legality in showing this material.

response 69 of 112:

Aug 11 21:41 UTC 1996

Thanks, Rob.  Now *I* don't feel like I have to rant about that.

response 71 of 112:

Aug 11 21:46 UTC 1996

Steve Weiss slipped in. #68 was in response to Mr. Gibbard.  Mr. Weiss is free
to treat his Equus equus as he sees fit; sexual abuse is not necessary or
suggested.  =} Jan and Steve Weiss are most likely correct, it just seems
shadowy to me, probably because I'm not enough of a Web hacker to understand
that way things are done.  I'll admit ignorance, and trepidation to new
technologies, and I appreciate their effort to clarify and assuage my concerns
(rather than simply insulting me and treating me like a child).  I'll shut
up about it now unless I see something relevant that I might add
constructively to.

response 73 of 112:

Aug 12 07:03 UTC 1996

Said that way, you're right, Jan.  For that matter, I can install WordPErfect
17 times in 17 different subdirectories on a single hard drive if it pleases
me, I'm just not supposed to install it on two computers that could be used
by two different people at once.  I hadn't thought about it that way.