> Quoting from Edward Reid (Thu Apr 21 15:53:18 1994):
> > Rhys and Piero are talking about apples and oranges. Piero is taking a
> > legalistic point of view, whereas Rhys is speaking practical terms. The
> > practical will win out over the legal.
>
> I think you quoted the wrong parts. The one who started speaking
> legalese was Rhys. He told me somebody could jump to lawyers if
> X-Copyright was added.
My legalese arises out of the practical issues. "If you build it, they
will come". :-)
> > The problem with X-Copyright is that users must
> > understand it yet it is subject to misinterpretation -- by *humans*.
>
> Think of this: humans who will interpret that header are service
> providers, not casual users. And given I think of a very short list,
> and a *clear* README, there should be very few errors.
Wrong. It is the _user_ who adds the X-Copyright header to their articles
so that they can be filtered by the service providers. The users will
need to know what is on the list and what it means, and will complain when
the tag "send this everywhere except for Charge 'Em Blind Pty Ltd" doesn't
occur on the list. They will complain even louder when "Charge 'Em Blind
Pty Ltd" lets one of their messages slip through: "I put the X-Copyright
header on it, and they didn't obey it! Does anyone know a good lawyer?".
A good analogy is the Distribution header. It is _supposed_ to restrict
what regions your article will be distributed within. However, a
combination of broken configurations and users who don't know what the
header really means has made it all but useless. Every now and then
you'll see a complaint along the lines of "I restricted my message to
Australia, but it ended up in the US! I demand that everyone in the world
upgrade their news software and configuration so that this travesty
doesn't occur ever again!".
Well, USENET just doesn't work that way. News is designed to go
everywhere, and stopping it spreading requires a lot of work. Hence my
position that if you want to restrict where your messages go, then _don't_
post it to USENET.
> > Humans are the only important element of the net.
> > The machines, ultimately, don't matter.
>
> OK OK. A small example:
> 'A' wants to set up a USENET site for fun. No money requested for
> connecting. Free phone lines, he's rich, and wants to pay for an
> incoming T1 and give access for free. 'A' sets up the machine, the
> software, and while configuring it sets this in config.file:
> x-copyright-refuse="none"
> Then, the *news software* will simply not scan the X-Copyright.
>
> 'B' wants to set up a USENET site for money. Exagerate amounts
> of money. He will charge 100$ each time a user reads a FAQ. He
> will set this in config.file:
> x-copyright-refuse="all"
> Then, the *news software* will put in junk all articles with
> a X-Copyright header, unless it says "Free".
If there is no legal requirement on a site which charges to change their
configuration in that way, then the system is useless. Most will consider
it a waste of time unless it has real legal teeth.
> Between 'all' and 'none', there should be some other keyword :)
> For example, I don't want Gnu-like licenses.
> x-copyright-refuse="GPL"
> I don't want Berkeley-like ones:
> x-copyright-refuse="UCB"
>
> This is meant as an easy *filter*.
> The ultimate, legal-binding, thing to do is, as usual, to read the article.
You envisage this as an "advisory" header field, but unless it is legally
binding in some way or we can force every user in the world to use the
right values, it will be useless 10 minutes after it is deployed. Since
service providers have to read the article anyway in your scheme, you
might as well not have X-Copyright in the first place.
You also have the scheme backwards. It's not sites that want to restrict
what they get (except for a few who are afraid of lawyer-happy news
posters). It's users who want to stop the site getting it in the first
place because they disagree with the site's policy. As long as you rely
on the receiving site to be nice and expend non-zero effort, the scheme
cannot work.
For what it's worth, there already exists a way to stop sites you don't
like from receiving your articles. It's called the Path line. e.g. if I
don't like "charge-em-blind.com", I set up my Path line like this:
Path: news.qut.edu.au!charge-em-blind.com!rhys
The software at "Charge 'Em Blind Pty Ltd" will now automatically drop my
article, thinking that it has already seen it. No need for X-Copyright:
I can now choose who I don't want to see my articles.
This also works in reverse. If I don't want to receive anything from
that site, I set up "charge-em-blind.com" as an alias for my site. My
software thinks that anything from that site has already been to my site
and drops it on the floor.
Ultimately, this is the only technical solution that can work 99% of the
time (even Path isn't fool-proof).
Cheers,
Rhys.
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