From: Jason Zions <jazz@hal.com>
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 94 10:10:36 PST
To: Jim choate <ravage@wixer.bga.com>
Subject: Re: Archiving mail-lists...
In-Reply-To: <9402011727.AA04285@wixer>
Message-ID: <9402011809.AA00254@jazz.hal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>If you are serious about your view then please forward a money order for
>$1000 dollars for having my original post stored on whatever medium you used
>to reply to it.

Sigh. One more time.

The courts have recognized that permission to make copies which are
essential for the perception of the work is implicitly granted by the
copyright owner when the work is distributed. In order to perceive your
copyrighted works my system *must* make a copy or three to get it to me (as
would intervening systems if we both lived on uucp links instead of
internet). This is relatively old ground that was plowed by computer cases;
the exact issue of having to load a copy of a program into ram in order to
execute it has indeed been the subject of litigation.

The quote from your message I include above falls under the Fair Use
exceptions, under both Scholarship and Criticism.

>There is no legal precedence at this time that would necessarily and
>automaticaly copyright every entry I (or you) made, Berne not withstanding,
>to inet or usenet. [...] When discussing copyright there is no involvment in
>medium of transmission other than what the original author limits it to
>prior to release of that material.

But this is *precisely* what the current law says. From the moment the work
exists in concrete form, and a posting *is* concrete form, copyright exists.
Usenet and Internet are merely distribution mechanisms, the use of which may
cause the copyright holder to implicitly grant certain rights (as described
above).

From another message:

>when I buy a software program the copyright notice specificaly states that I
>am allowed to make copies for backup purposes. Some of them notices on high-
>dollar packages even tell me how many I can keep and whether I can keep them
>on a network or not.

Yep. Backups are separate from implicit rights granted due to the medium of
expression; I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, except that
there is a recognized right for you to make a backup of your usenet news
archives. But you can't distribute that backup.

From yet another message:

>I have to admit that I have broken your fair use copyright notice
>inadvertantly.
>
>I have stored an image of your message in the ram on my system which is not a
>part of inet or usenet nor involved in any way with the transmission to other
>nodes of such stored material.

You can't perceive the work without loading it into some device that can
turn electrical signals into something perceivable by a human; ram on a
computer is as good as anything else. As I stated above, this has been
covered by case law; it's a copy necessary to the perception of the work.
(The identical case arises with CDs - the bits are copied into a buffer in
your CD-player before they're fed through the D/A converters. This copy is
necessary to perceiving the work and hence permission is implicitly
granted.)

Jason