Douglas,
You can't share or transfer copyright except through an estate. I couldn't grant you copyright on this post if I wanted to. I could license, even to my exclusion, three of my four rights within copyright, excluding "moral rights", the right to enjoy credit for the post. (US copyright law (1976) differs from Canadian copyright law on this point.) If you edit a post, you would have sole copyright on the edited, technically new, post, and the author would have copyright on what was submitted. Very technically, this also raises the question of infringement, as when someone manages to submit a post to the owner at other than the list address, and the owner/editor/moderator edits the post and forwards it to the list.
As publisher, you have one of two scenarios. Either you publish a writing as submitted, in which case you do not have copyright, but in the very least, assuming that it was submitted *for* the purposes of distribution, at least a one-time non-exclusive license for distribution (which would preclude publishing anything from the archives), or you edit a post, making it yours, taking copyright *on your version* in the process. Magazines typically follow the latter method by changing the title on submissions from "contributing editors". Book publishers "hire" writers, sealing the contract with an advance, and by virtue of their employment, the employer has copyright. I employ the method of distinctively setting out my edits so as to not make the post mine, having made my contribution obvious and separate from the submitted material, effectively quoting a copyrighted writing.
I do edit posts on occasion (Eudora with its redirection command is good for this as it forwards, retaining the original sender), ensuring my comments are in square brackets, bolded, or such, though we have a fairly strict editing policy which is restricted to preventing non-disclosure of certain personal information, thus 99% of my edits are "[name deleted]" or similar.
Yesterday, I added a paragraph to our lists' welcome messages, advising new subscribers that they have copyright in their posts and are responsible for their content but that by virtue of their having subscribed, are granting us a non-exclusive license to publish and or re-publish their submitted content, ratified with each and every post they submit, which we may edit to ensure the post complies with our policy and terms of subscription and that of our facilitator. It's a (medical) patient list, with discussion of sometimes sensitive topics. (Occasionally, a subscriber discloses the identity of their health care provider in association with some questionable procedure or therapy contrary to list rules.)
A bit off topic, but regarding copyright on the Internet, it is being enforced more aggressively. One large web hosting firm, having a team of staff lawyers, has subscribed to every list and newsgroup they've been able to locate, and for a hefty annual fee, perform daily searches for reproduction of webpages on lists, particularly news items. Senior legal counsel for the group expressed that successful legal actions in the US for Internet copyright infringement are quadrupling annually, with 191 so far this year (April '01).
I've also seen more software appearing for fingerprinting images, where a phrase can be embedded in a JPEG, using the 24th or 32nd bit of every pixel, with a loss of less than 2% of the sharpness of the image. I came across a news site this morning that appears to be embedding its news stories into GIF files rather than HTML text loaded from an address other than the main webserver, thwarting the Edit Copy and Image Save functions.
Michael
At 09:06 PM 5/11/01 -0500, Douglas wrote:
>The ones which I
>actually edit have, besides the copyright of the author, my copyright as
>editor. I don't know if it is correct or not, but we maintain that the
>host site is the publisher and as such may claim a secondary or tertiary
>copyright.
>
>Fortunately, we've never, so far, had to test any of this in court, and
>I would just as soon not. Douglas
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