Many dial-up BBS's out there which require a paid membership probably
carry FAQ's like yours. Has each and every one which carries your FAQ
contacted you? Do you feel they are in violation? Many Internet
providers charge by the hour -- even if they aren't doing the
distribution, when the receiver FTP's your FAQ and reads it on line or
downloads, clearly it is not free to the receiver. Has each and every
one contacted you? Is this a violation? Commercial companies provide
news feeds, including news.answers and charge for what clearly is an
act of distribution; there is one vendor which sells a news feed via
CD-ROM every couple of weeks, even. Has each and every one contacted
you? Is this a violation? This issue is not black and white.
I am reminded of the periodic and fruitless uproars which often
occured a half dozen years back when shareware authors tried imposing
all sorts of restrictions on what kind of redistribution was
acceptable -- many put in "cost of distribution" since it was the most
reasonable clause. Some users flamed on endlessly about how floppies
at $5 wasn't a reasonable cost of distribution; some authors flamed
vendors which sold CD-ROM's containing their works charging more than
some arbitrary ceiling they had placed on media costs, etc. The
difference between that scenario and for FAQ maintainers, presumably,
is that most of us do not put "If you don't pay me $N within X days,
you must forget everything you learned from my intellectual work."
However, most shareware authors seemed to have accepted CD-ROM
distribution not as a necessary evil, but as a reasonable good.
--- Yours in Leadership, Friendship, and Service, Ping Huang (INTERNET: pshuang@mit.edu), probably speaking for himself
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved