From: Joe Portale (jportale@gci-net.com)
Date: 03/10/01-11:25:33 AM Z
This has been an interesting thread. To address your question Nick, another
mail list owner wanted to place all the list emails on a CD and sell them to
the members for the cost of reproduction. No real profit. His legal
beagles informed him that he needed to get the written permission of every
person that posted to that mailing list. I will surmise that if the email
is sent to a central and common repository, and your intent was to allow
people to read the email, no problem. But once another takes control of
that email, that is where things get sticky.
Editorial comment. For the most part, I believe that the idea of copy right
protection is a good one. It does protect us from having our work taken by
others. The unfortunate question is in today's market, who is being
protected? Are we really concerned with the rights of the other person's
intellectual property or have we fallen victim to scam by lawyers trying to
turn a fast buck? When is enough, enough? These are extreme examples, yet
they are real. A Japanese firm copy righted the view from a California Golf
Course and sued three photographers that took pictures of that vista and
published them in various commercial magazines. (I'm taking mountains and
ocean view folks, not someone's house. Check me if I'm wrong, but doesn't
the world belong to everyone?)
A major publishing company found a distant relative of Herman Melville. And
in his name, sued in federal court for the past and future profits from the
work Moby Dick. There was an active search for relatives of people like,
George Fennimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Stephan Crane and others. Are
these people really interested in defending the rights of these greats? I
doubt it.
So the question for debate is: You create an email, send it to a public
list, such as this, should that email be treated as intellectual property
and copy rightable? These are not private letters, they have been sent into
the world to be read by all. Comments?
Joe Portale
Tucson, AZ
Fellin' a little preachy this morning.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Makris" <nick@mcn.org>
To: "Alt Photo" <alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca>
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2001 9:37 AM
Subject: Still on Copyright
> While we're on the subject, what about email messages found on the web?
You
> may or may not know that all the messages you send are not only archived,
> they are catagorized by several of the major search engines. Try
searching
> for your own name and see if the results don't include a message you sent
to
> the list some time back.
>
> In any case, what is the consideration for copyright of these messages?
>
> Comments?
>
> Nick
>
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