(A lurker crawls out of the shadows....)
Personally, I have nothing against further distribution of my
Plants-By-Mail FAQ. It can only help the FAQ system, as well as get the
word out....
That said....
The people who are complaining about copyright violations have a valid
point. What if, for example, someone takes a handful of FAQ's, cleans up
the formatting, and publishes it as a book? When you think about it, that
isn't so different from publishing them on a CD-ROM. Either way, our work
is being used to make someone else a profit, however nominal or indirect.
What really gets me is this: Maintainers of current FAQs, by and large,
aren't hard people to find. Our E-mail addresses are generally in our
FAQ's, often in more than one place. We are, by and large, active on the
Net. So, given this, why can't they write a simple program that compiles a
list of all the FAQ maintainers and their works (by looking at the headers
of all the FAQ's), then send E-mail to each individual saying something
like, "We would like to include your FAQ, 'alt.foo.bar FAQ' in a CD-ROM
compilation. If you want more information, we will be happy to provide it.
To grant permission, simply state so in a reply to this letter."
The whole process can't take more than a couple person-days, including
answering all the replys. The advantage to the company, aside from
avoiding copyright liability, is that they gain the goodwill of the FAQ
maintainers: something they might well want if they plan to contibue this
venture more than a few years.
-----
Peter Leppik p-leppi@uiuc.edu
Lost in the Information Supercollider
http://jean-luc.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/PeterL/HOME.html
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