Re: The Depravities of Cypherpunks

[pierre@shell.portal.com (Pierre Uszynski)]

Jason Zions thus emailed:

> >Also, I have mail from Mr. Jason Zions (jazz@hal.com) also complaining
> >that I violated Mr. Metzger's privacy in revealing his mailbomb to me
> >to the list as a whole. This strange code of cypherpunk chivalry I am
> >not familar with.
> 
> It's not chivalry; it's copyright law. The creator of a message owns the
> copyright to that intellectual property;

Apart from the ridicule of this whole thing, there at least two different
and independent issues here: Privacy issues and copyright issues.

And I'm still not fully clear on the legal side of some of their
subtelties (help from our legal types would be appreciated).

In the case of private mail from one person to an other. I'm under the
impression that the sender retains copyright ownership on the message,
but that the receiver has the right to make the content public (as in
disclosing what it is about, and that the communication occured).
(This impression gleaned from -Syslaw, Lance Rose, Jonathan Wallace, 1992-
in particular)

How far the recipient can go in disclosing is not clear: posting the whole
or part of the message seems to go against the ownership rule. Header
notices like "Do not forward" or "reposting with permission only" do not
change much the ownership issue, but do they alter the privacy issue? What
is the origin of any right of the recipient to disclose the message to
third party? For that matter, is there sufficient "intellectual input"
in a short mail bomb / threat like the one that was used (if I remember)
to cause significant copyright ownership?

Apologies for nitpicking. It's just that the ownership/privacy issue is
very important for the Future Net, and that I'm interested in THAT aspect
of the war.

> Given the nature of the communication (i.e. mention of potential email
> bombing), I believe you'd be within your rights to share the threatening
> content of the message with upstream mail host admins who might play a role
> in preventing such an occurance; but no further.

Given the nature of the communication, I believe it's clearly his rights
to make the threats public... especially in the case where
the threatener is his own sysadmin, and especially on this list where
we can all (ahem... :-) benefit from knowing how things evolve (nobody
forces anybody to read any of the longish drivel, mine included).

> It's also common courtesy. You can have significant disagreements with a
> person, yet still honor their simple requests.

LOL

This really cracks me up. I mean, that some bystanders still use the words
"common courtesy", "disagreements" and "simple requests" when talking
about this war. Remember both/either sides could have started using
mail filters ages ago, instead they are now proudly mail bombing and
reputation bombing.

Just a bystander... maybe standing a bit in the middle...
Pierre.
pierre@shell.portal.com