Re: archiving on inet

[Jason Zions <jazz@hal.com>]

> Furthermore, just because something is forwarded and something is archived
>I don't believe is expressly covered in copyright law.

It's not the forwarding or the archiving that makes anything covered by
copyright law; it is the setting down, in concrete form, the expression of
an idea.

> Others could argue that postings by their very nature, when posted 
>become "public domain", and thus not copyrightable.

Not successfully in court, I should think. How is a posting any different
than the production of a radio program which is distributed by
store-and-forward satellite distribution and then played through the radio
station and received at your home radio? The mechanisms are close to
identical in their attributes; tapes at the stations have some lifetime,
timeshifting can occur, special equipment is needed to perceive the work,
etc.

>Finally what is the tangible difference between storing usenet postings 
>on a hard disk for an indefinite time, or on a cd-rom, or a cd that is 
>re-writable, or tape or any other storage device? Not very much I would 
>argue.

If you were a ligitimate recipient of the work in the first place (i.e. got
it in a newsfeed) and you store those postings for your own use or for the
use of others on that node in the store-and-forward network, then you can
keep the work 'til the bits rot. Infringement occurs when you copy those
bits onto some medium for some purpose other than store-and-forward
propagation or the allowed fair-use exceptions; stuffing articles on a
CD-ROM and selling them falls into neither category and hence is an
infringement.

Jason