Wed, 22 Feb 1995 12:15:13 +0100
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In the first item, AOL is claiming a copyright for the *compilation* work
that they are doing in selecting what things to put on their public
areas. They are also telling their customers that they can only use such
material for their private use. This essentially means that Joe Customer
can't FTP AOL's public directories to his BBS and sell access for
$5/month. AOL doesn't claim copyright for the contents of all the
original text, just for the work involved in selecting and compiling the
data (ie the manpower this costs them). You can still get permission from
the original authors to use the original items (but not the collective
compilation) in another way.
The second item is for their protection. They're saying that if Joe
Customer writes an essay and decides to post it in the public areas, AOL
is free to redistribute it for free, and so on. That is the
straightforward part - you can't have people sending AOL a bill for every
usenet article they authored on the assumption that it made AOL so much
more attractive to other customers :-) The part that may sound confusing
is the one about third party work posted to the public area. It may sound
like AOL is trying to assume the right to resell the material on your
list. What they really mean is that they don't have the manpower or
desire to review each and every posting as it is placed in the public
area. So, if Joe Customer places something written by a third party (or
coming from a mailing list) in their public area, Joe is implicitly
warranting to AOL that there won't be any copyright problem. If this
later turns out to be restricted material and someone sues AOL, AOL can
in turn sue Joe to recover.
I think you'll find that these are pretty standard service provider
terms, at least assuming they only apply to the public areas. Like most
legal documents they sound very fascist :-)
Eric
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