response 65 of 168:

Nov 8 03:43 UTC 2001

Some discussion of this at the board meeting made me think of some of the
implications if this passes, and how I, as a staff member would tend to want
to interpret things.  It's worth discussing these up front, since they may
influence how people want to word this.

An example of the kind of case where staff involvement might come up is this:

  User A deletes one of his postings.  User B notices the deletion, pulls a
  copy of the deleted response out of his scrollback buffer, and reposts it.
  User A asks staff to delete the copy.  What does staff do?

If this motion passed, my interpretation would be that the author of a hunk
of text has the right to withdraw it from Grex, wherever it may appear.  The
copyright remains with the author, and the author has a right to revoke any
license given in the past to Grex to publish it.

So, in the case described above I would delete the copy of the text upon
request of the original author.

Some caveats to this:

  -  I would not delete anything without an explicit request from the author.
     Grex's staff is not obligated to investigate every possible copyright
     violation to see if the poster actually had permission from the author.
     Though, of course, if I post a New York Times article, anyone (staff or
     not) who wants to is welcome to ask the New York Times if they care,
     and if the New York Times responses by asking staff to delete it, we
     will do so.  I would not view it as the responsibility of staff to
     make such inquiries, though it would certainly be within the rights of
     any staff member who wanted to.
     
  -  I have to be reasonably sure the request to delete is actually from the
     author.  I wouldn't be terribly hard nosed about this, we'll give people
     reasonable benefit of doubt, but the law actually puts some fairly
     tough requirements on such request - they must have a legal signature on
     them (electronic or ink on paper) and so forth.  So we are within our
     rights to demand reasonable evidence, though I'd not normally actually
     require that all the hoops be jumped through as long as I were satisfied
     with the legitimacy of the complaint.

  -  In the above scenario, if instead of reposting the full original text
     of the deleted response, user B posted a summary in his own words of
     the content of the deleted response, perhaps even with some short
     quotes from the original, then I would *not* honor a request to delete.
     Copyright protects only the exact words, not the ideas, and short quotes
     are "fair use".  (P.S. - this is another reason I'd like to keep a staff
     readable copy of deleted text - so that we can tell if a posted summary
     is the original wording or not.)

  -  In fact, in some instances, when deleting text, I might myself replace
     it with a short summary of what was deleted.  If this were done, clear
     steps would have to be taken to make it obvious that the words were mine,
     not the original author's or the poster's.  I'm not totally sure I'd do
     this, but I'm sure it'd be legal.  Mostly I think this would be best
     done by replacing the original text with a forward reference to a response
     under my own name that includes any explanation I want to make.

I'm not completely sure how to handle a case where a response that was
originally entered in one place on Grex and then gets copied to another place
on Grex, either because the item was linked, or because someone copied a
response from one item into another.  What do I do if the author wants it
revoked from one place, but not the other?

To some degree, I'm disinclined to handle things piecemeal.  Either you gave
Grex permission to publish, or you didn't.  Revoke permission and we'll
delete it entirely from everywhere on Grex.  On the other hand, it might be
silly to fuss about, since if I insist that they have to delete it from
everywhere, then they could do that and then repost it themselves to only
the places they want it to be.  Mostly though, I think having given people
a right to decide whether or not their text is to appear on Grex, we don't
have to give too much credence to quibbles about *where* on Grex a given
piece of text is placed.

Some people have claimed that users should have a right to edit.  I don't
think copyright law does that.  A copyright is on the exact wording of a
document.  I think editing a document would be viewed in copyright law as
destroying one document and creating a new one.  On Grex you would have both
those rights if this motion passes.  There is no particular need for us to
let you place your new document in the same place the old one was.

response 67 of 168:

Nov 8 05:26 UTC 2001

Actually, editting a document creates a "derivative" work under
copyright law.  If the person doing the editting is a different person
than the copyright owner, both people have copyrights on the resulting
material.

response 69 of 168:

Nov 8 23:43 UTC 2001

You better check your facts.  Actually, audio recordings are a special
case; if you make an audio recording of an event, you own the copyright
on *that* recording, which is separate from anyone else's copyright.
Hence, if CNN news makes an audio recording of a speech given by a
politician, they have a copyright on that recording, which is separate
and independent from NBC's recording of the same speech.  This is one of
the reasons why they don't generally allow you to make recordings of
concerts.  Music often has 2 copyrights; one is of the audio recording
and sometimes ends up owned by the performers, although more often it
ends up owned by some giant media corporate conglomerate, the other is
of the music itself.  If you look at pop music at the end of a movie,
you'll often see 2 copyrights per song because of this.  Classical music
may only have 1 copyright because the music has passed into the public
domain.

As a general rule, authors of original creative works that are marketted
commercially do not permit derivative works to be made.  Hence, in your
average book, you will only see 1 copyright notice.  In a few cases,
such as corrections to books, etc., the authors may require you to
assign any rights you have to them before they make use of your
material; this is common with "letters to the editor" in newspaper
columns for instance.  There *are* cases where you will see derivative
works with multiple copyright notices -- for instance, commercial Unix
releases commonly have this because they've incorporated software with
various forms of BSD software in them.

Note that all of copyright law is changing; it's *possible* that DMCA
has somehow fundementally changed the nature of derivative works,
although I've never heard anyone claim this as a feature of DMCA.

response 71 of 168:

Nov 9 03:06 UTC 2001

resp:63, resp:64 ::  I'll try to piece together revised wording for 
the proposal for the weekend.
(Too tired to do it tonight, and too busy to do it Friday, alas.)

response 73 of 168:

Nov 9 13:16 UTC 2001

Yes, but derivative works may only be created with the permission of the
original content owner.

response 75 of 168:

Nov 9 17:18 UTC 2001

re #73:  That is not an entirely true assertion.  You would be more
correct to say that the author of an original work used in a subsequent
derivative work may have cause for action.  Prior restraint, which you
assert, is rarely allowed under U.S. law.

response 79 of 168:

Nov 9 23:41 UTC 2001

I believe Phil is in agreement with my statements, although he apparently
has yet to recognize said concurrence, and chooses to overlook the 
exceptions.

re #78:  Your example falls under "fair use" and is legal to do, although
it would fail to receive copyright protection.  That is my nonlegal opinion.

If anyone else would like to join the "Who Wants To Be A Copyright Expert?"
game, there is a searchable listing of 17 USC at http://uscode.house.gov
and at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode.  Title 17 covers federal
copyright law.

response 81 of 168:

Nov 10 00:25 UTC 2001

Ken, I just got around to reading the handout you gave everyone
at the last board meeting.  You obviously spent a lot of time on it.
Would you want to enter it here or place a pointer to a file? 

Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

response 83 of 168:

Nov 10 01:08 UTC 2001

Generally, copyright law applies to distribution/publication/*copying*
of material, not what you do with it yourself.  Hence, you certainly
have the right to make derivative works -- you *are* making a derivative
work (of a sort) merely in listening to it, as the pattern of nerve
impulses is related in an obvious but not completely accurate fashion to
the material that was impressed upon them, and leaves behind a permament
derived work that continues to change inside the brain.  You are also
allowed to take your copy of "gone with the wind", to chop it up with a
pair of scissors, and paste the bits over the crack in your bedroom
window.

These are generally covered under "fair use", although copyright owners
have been busy eroding just what "fair use" means over the past 40
years, especially in the last 10 with regards to digital copies of
material.

response 85 of 168:

Nov 11 04:03 UTC 2001

Actually, I consider #65 a huge improvement over the status quo.

We already have to make the same judgment calls.  Marcus just deleted some
text from Agora because someone asked that it be deleted.  It was text
imported from elsewhere, not text originally posted on Grex, but aside from
that little detail, the judgement call was the same - was the complaint from
the legitimate copyright holder?  Was the posting on Grex fair use?

None of the options - delete command logging to a readable file, working
delete command, no delete command - protect the staff from having to make
these kinds of judgements sometimes.  99% of the time though, they aren't such
hard calls to make.

However, if the user doesn't have a delete command or only has a pretend
delete command, then staff gets to deal with *all* of these instances.  If
the user can delete his own postings, then many copyright complaints can be
resolved by the poster all by himself without staff assistance.  This is not
possible otherwise.

Furthermore, it absolves Grex from having to get it's users to agree to any
special terms to use Grex.  We recognize the author's full rights over his
text.  We don't need any irrevocable license to anything, so we don't need
anything more than the implied license the user makes when posting the item.
We treat our users with maximum respect and trust that they won't abuse there
privileges.  Fits right in with the Grex philosophy, if you ask me.

Avoiding the need for such an agreement avoids the need to deal with the
question of how to make it retroactive.  Since we probably can't, any kind
of user agreement would mean Grex operating under two sets of rules, one
for old responses, one for new ones.  But with the solution proposed here,
we'd be resolving the issue by giving the users more rights, specifically
rights that many users already think they have, not by taking them away.
How much saner can you get?

response 87 of 168:

Nov 13 13:17 UTC 2001

Would that wording mean that if I'd entered a response in an item started by
somebody else, they could remove my text by removing "their" item?