On Mon, 19 Jun 1995 14:28:31 +0000 Marianne Brosseau <[log in to unmask]> said: >"Otherwise if you extracted one message from the digest in good faith it >would not have the copyright, and what if you then resent it, who would >be to blame," If I receive a big digest that comes with one banner at the top of the digest (but not at the top of each individual message) that says "Copyright 1995 Foo Inc. Redistributed with permission. All rights reserved worldwide" and I have a mail program that happily bursts the digest into individual messages, I can then view them individually and not see the copyright. I can honestly forget about the copyright that was in the header 30 messages above the one I am reading. I can then forward this to a friend for his private amusement, and unless I tell him he won't have a clue that this is copyrighted material. He may repost the material in good faith. And who gets sued? Not the friend, who couldn't know, and probably not me, at least not unless I have enough money to make the case interesting to the lawyer. The Internet consulting company who did the repost and runs the list gets sued, because they did not take "reasonable steps" to ensure it was clear to everyone that the material was owned by Foo Inc, and because there is probably a contract between them and Foo Inc. saying under what conditions they can repost the material, and a missing comma in page 21 that after a $100,000 legal battle will establish that they screwed up. That is the kind of situation you want to avoid. > It is true that it can be *useful* to include a copyright notice, >but as indicated in Templeton's article..." it is not necessary. " It is not necessary to include a copyright in order for the work to be protected. However, your work is better protected if it bears an explicit copyright. This is particularly important when the work you are posting is not copyrighted by you, but by a third party, especially if it's a big corporation. And this is even more important when the work is confidential. If you get a message from me describing the internals of some cutting edge industrial process, you may assume that it is copyrighted and ask me whether it can be reposted. Or you may not know anything about the technology in question and think it is a common bread toaster, and send it to a friend who works in that field to ask him to explain what this all means. But if it starts with: ************************************************************************* *************************** IBM CONFIDENTIAL **************************** ************************************************************************* Copyright 1995 IBM Corp. I'll bet you'll think twice before forwarding it to someone working at DEC who knows that stuff and can explain it to you. Of course in the academic world we hardly ever run into this kind of situation. But some companies use LISTSERV for internal product design and development. The material they post to the list is confidential and owned by the company. They want to make this clear with each and every message, and we have to provide the necessary tools. Eric