At 12:50 AM 1/29/99 -0600, Winship wrote:

>Which reminds me, what about this stuff about registering with
>the copyright office, now at LC, for proctection as third party
>in copyright infringelment suits?  We got a lawyer out there
>who can expalin it?

And is it sufficient any more (or was it ever?) to have as terms of
subscription that all list members are solely responsible for the material
they post to the list and that by joining the list they indemnify the list
owner, the organization running the list and the ISP hosting the list from
all legal action arising out of said post?

And this is included in the welcome message and in the subscription
"agreement" (set up in the same way as the questionnaires discussed
earlier) which all new list subscribers receive and must return before
being added to the list. And also included in the welcome message and
subscription agreement are the fact that reposting copyrighted material,
except as allowed under fair use, is expressly prohibited without prior
written approval from the copyright holder and that written permission must
be submitted to the listowners before material is posted to the list.
Failure to abide by these terms gets you immediately and permanently
unsubbed.

So we remind everybody about this policy regularly and also tell the list
membership that if we get sued we will go away because the money used to
defend my organization against such suits is more than we can afford. And
we'd just have to turn around and sue the person who posted the copyrighted
information in the first place.

On the other hand, I do not think that we would be likely targets for such
law suits. Nobody is making any money here. The material likely to be
redistributed is newspaper articles, medical journal articles, and such
things which have little monetary value and for which it would be hard to
prove a real harm from the redistribution. Nobody is redistributing
software or copyrighted music or other big ticket items with ligitious
publishers.

Still ... if anybody can provide the skinny on how this might affect list
owners and site maintainers I am sure that a lot of us would read it with
great interest. Anybody know any copyright lawyers who might be interested
in having a lunchtime online conference with this group to explain it all
to us?

Karen Strauss
Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Network
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