On Sun, 14 Apr 2002 18:33:08 -0700, rex <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Got a court case to cite? I strongly doubt that the courts will hold
>that a copyright holder loses that right by posting. By that reasoning
>an author would lose copyright by publishing on dead trees.

I did not mean to imply that the author loses copyright by posting a message
to a list.  By law, copyright rests with the original author of any work.  As
long as that author never publishes the work or allows anyone else to see it
or know of its existence, questions of copyright protection are not
applicable.  Once the author makes the work public or exposes it to other
people (for example by posting the work to an e-mail list), then the
protections of the copyright act can become applicable.  When the author posts
a message, copyright rests with the original author unless/until they assign
their rights to someone else.