As far as I can tell, everybody agrees that the very act of posting
allows any copying that is "standard usenet and internet usage", no
matter what the license says. What walnut creek is doing qualifies as
standard usenet & internet usage. You've waived your right to control
this type of thing by the very act of posting your FAQs.
Why do I believe it's "standard usenet and internet usage"? Two
reasons. One is that it's been going on for years, with little or no
legal problem. Both changing to non-electronic media and charging for
the bits date to before the great renaming.
The second is that I've only seen one workable test for "standard
usenet and internet usage", and that's "any usage that grabs
everything indiscriminately." What Walnut Creek does is exactly that.
What someone like Rich Morin does for the PTF disk is different, and
needs to be (and is) treated differently.
There are legitimate complaints about the CDROM. You should use the
letter to address those, not whine about something that's basically
immaterial.
Some of you are worried about loss of copyrights if this goes through
as planned. I'm not - because my copyright allows "standard usenet
usage", which is what they're doing. I've decided to make the above
test explicit, but that's just a clarification. Any copyright which
disallows such usage - for example, by disallowing postings to .com
hosts - can be changed to protect the authors from such loss of
copyrights.
Others have expressed a wish to change their FAQs for the change of
audience, or to indicate where new versions are. All of these boil
down to a chance to change things.
I feel that that chance is the correct thing to ask for. Either to
delay the CD-ROM a month so that new versions can propogate, or to
allow authors to send in updated versions to be used instead of
denying usage.
Along the same lines, asking that a warning that these FAQS are dated,
and instructions on how to find the most recent version of any FAQ be
included prominently on the disk would alleviate a lot of problems.
These requests are liable to be respected instead of ignored. They
also solve the legitimate problems people have with this CDROM while
improving the CDROM with little work, rather than create much extra
work with no benefit except salving wounded egos.
<mike
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