RE: COMMON in San Antonio (fwd)

["Kahn, David" <KAHN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Lazarus (mlazarus@ttec.com) wrote:

> Are you implying that all the companies that post their copyrighted code
>on the 'net have lost their full rights, just because the paper trail is
>gone?

I'm fairly sure your rights remain, at least in the UK, but Bob's
obviously gone quite deeply into this. Any copyright lawyers out there?

> If you are talking about restricting physical access, then you may have a
>point; it's certainly easier to access the material from the 'net then to
>get your hands on a paper or CD copy.

Not only can it be accessed but it's likely to get propagated.
Unattributed copyrighted material turns up on the Internet all the time.
Someone sees something, passes it to someone else, they post it to a
news group, someone else cuts out the good bits and mails them on to a
friend etc. etc. Like the game of Chinese whispers the original gets
subtly altered every few editions and the attributions and copyright
notices are the first to go.

It's a problem if you see something good and you want to share it. How
can you tell if you're infringing someone's copyright? For example, the
top 10 diary entries of Bill Gates that got posted here a few days ago
(innocently, I'm sure) was not attributed although it was only a few
days old and was lifted from Chris White's Top 5 List
(http://www.topfive.com) and is copyright of Ziff-Davis. Also the
original list had 11 entries. The original number 1 somehow got dropped
and everything else was moved up one. For the record, the original
number 1 was "Seventh day: rested".

Dave Kahn - TCO, Tengiz, Kazakstan
=========

e-mail:  kahn@tengizchevroil.com    (until September 30th)
         dkahn@cix.compulink.co.uk  (from  October 1st)
+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to "MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com".
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MAJORDOMO@midrange.com
|    and specify 'unsubscribe MIDRANGE-L' in the body of your message.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---