I completely agree- this is not black and white. However, I personally
consider my act of posting to the Internet as granting permission to
commercial providers who carry the newsgroup to redistribute the FAQ,
as I am (generally :-) ) aware of how the Internet is
carried. (This is just my policy.)
In essense, I do take it like a BBS who charges for membership is
in violation of my copyright if they have my FAQ and didn't ask for
permission. However, I also take it like the California
Highway Patrol here in San Diego- I've never been pulled over for going
less than or equal to 65 MPH on the freeway in the city, and I don't
think very many motorists around here have either. If you got a ticket
you were probably going 70+. In other words, as long as I generally
don't feel abused, and/or feel that it's not worth pursing, I won't
pursue it. I might be *slightly* irked as a matter of principle over
the Walnut Creek CD since all they had to do was to drop me a quick
e-mail line, but I'm too laid back to lose any sleep over it. :-)
Just my opinion, I already know others disagree about how strongly
it should be pursued (e.g. you let one get through, and there's a
snowball).
Also, just for the record, I am not interested in royalties. I have had
many requests in the past year for partial or complete reproductions
of my FAQ, and I have granted permission to every one with minimal
conditions (e.g. no paraphrasing). My FAQ is on several FTP sites
(aside from the mirrors of rtfm.mit.edu), GEnie, AOL (not just
via the Usenet feed they have), Compuserve, Delphi, etc. and I don't
worry about it. My FAQ has explicit dates/version numbers on it, a warning
that if it's more than a month old it's probably out of date in some way,
and contains in several places my e-mail address, and I always have a
friendly offer to mail the FAQ to anyone who asks.
-Tom
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