On Tue, 05 Sep 2000, Michael Paul Johnson wrote:
> Your mileage may vary. Claim a copyright, a copyleft
> (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), or dedicate the work to the public
> domain as you see fit. It is your FAQ.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Well, yes and no, in my view. The author(s) of a FAQ have collected the know-
ledge of the readership of the newsgroup into a (logically) single document in
order to make it easily available to those who have not been present in the
group in question _ab origine_ or even earlier.
It seems to me (IANAL) that a FAQ has a compilation copyright (like a book of
essays or of short stories, all by differest authors), but that copyright of
various parts belongs to the original authors of the answers contributed unless
they have been explictly assigned to the FAQ maintainer. Note that: Even the
mailing list itself refers to us as "maintainers" rather than as "authors".
So I'm not sure that a FAQ maintainer can put the FAQ into the public domain,
unless the maintainer is also the author of every part, or has explicitly
received the right from the author(s) of those parts the maintainer did not
write.
And "copyleft" is simply using the copyright to force a user to behave in a
certain manner--violators of "copyleft" are prosecuted for copyright violation.
The names of the authors of/contributors to the humanities.classics FAQ are all
listed at the end of the document.
Rich Alderson alderson@netcom.com
until 30 Sept 2000, when shell accounts go away from here.
I haven't yet decided where I'll post from after that.
Hoping soon to be the *ex*-maintainer of the humanities.classics FAQ
*************************************************************
To unsubscribe send a message to majordomo@faqs.org as
unsubscribe faq-maintainers fill-in-your-email-address-here
*************************************************************
[
FAQ Archive |
Search FAQ Mail Archive |
Authors |
Usenet References
]
[
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996 |
1997 |
1998 |
1999 |
2000
]
© Copyright The Internet FAQ Consortium, 1997-2000
All rights reserved