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
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