My apologies in advance if this has already been discussed - I seem to have
over 100 messages in my mailbox on this issue, and I haven't had the time
to read every one. However,...
I called the Walnut Creek CDROM people, and spoke to Bob Bruce, who was
very friendly and very helpful. I explained that the document I wrote
is owned by the many people who contributed material (and that the US
Gov't probably owns the compilation copyright, since I wrote it at the Lab,)
and that I simply could not grant him permission to reproduce it.
He told me that he would simply remove my FAQ (Sci.physics) from the CDROM.
No problems, if that is what I want. I assume that he is a man of his word,
and will do so.
We also had an interesting converation about the legalities of it all,
which are, admittedly, somewhat obscure. He pointed out that people
are making money of my FAQ all the time already by selling CDROMs and
tapes of the entire daily Usenet news spool, or by charging connection
fees (i.e., Compuserve, et.al., who now offer gateways to the Internet.),
and that some of that value obviously comes from the FAQs which are available.
I don't know what to make of that, other than to acknowledge that it
is obviously a true statement. It's not clear that offering a selective
subset of the Usenet news is any more offensive, or why putting it on
CDROM rather than in book form is more or less and egregious offense.
Well, it's food for thought.
Regards,
-Scott Chase
[
Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive |
Search Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997
]
© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved