Re: archiving on inet

[Jason Zions <jazz@hal.com>]

>The reason selling a tape of a radio show isn't legal is because then
>you can play it as often as you like.

Even if you made play-once-and-then-self-destruct tapes like on Mission
Impossible, selling them would still be illegal. You've made an unauthorized
copy, plain and simple.

>You can archive them forever, and in fact thats part of the news software.

Yes, you, a recipient, can archive them forever. You *cannot* distribute
that archive in any form whatsoever.

I'm struggling with drawing an appropriate distinction between CD-ROM as
newsfeed medium and CD-ROM as archive medium. If a newsfeed provider sent
you a quarterly newsfeed on CD-ROM which you then fed into your normal news
system as if it were a live feed, after which you broke the CD-ROM; that
looks like a high-bandwidth-delay-product newsfeed. If a provider sent you a
quarterly newsfeed in Cnews directory form which you then mounted onto your
news system, I'd buy that as a newsfeed. If the provider sent to a newsfeed
in Cnews form which you mounted someplace other than as a part of the news
system - now an archive has been created and sold. But if you mounted it as
part of Cnews and then copied it via news onto your own CD-ROM drive, then
it seems like it'd be a personal archive.

No one said this was gonna be easy. It seems like I'm swallowing camels and
straining out flies, but these flies are camel-sized.

Jason

Copyright 1994 Jason Zions. Copying or retransmission for the purpose of
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