Mailinglist privacy: MY NAME ALL OVER GOOGLE!
Bart Silverstrim
bsilver at chrononomicon.com
Fri May 6 05:42:24 PDT 2005
On May 6, 2005, at 7:08 AM, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> Fafa Hafiz Krantz writes:
>
>> What if ones life is at risk?
>
> As I've said, send a DMCA to the owner of the archive (and to other
> parties if they have copies). If they don't take down the infringing
> material, you can sue. If their ISPs don't cooperate, you can sue them
> as well.
Yup. Sue the mailing list archive, sue the ISPs, sue the list
members...after all, they could have saved the information in their
email client. Oh, and sue Google too.
Who do you sue if you write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, they
publish it, then you decide you want to take back what you wrote?
When you post to a public mailing list, there is no more expectation of
privacy than you have walking down a public sidewalk. You made the
decision to make your words public. Good luck taking them back,
Sparky.
>> There should be a law protecting users against this.
>
> There is: copyright law. But most technical geeks don't know much
> about
> it, so they try to pretend that it doesn't exist.
Bull. It's a very important issue for "geeks", especially with various
open source factions starting to get into court disputes over
licensing. The ones who pretend there are no copyright laws are the
people who pirate materials off the Internet, and the majority of them
aren't "technical geeks".
Here's some info that seems to show that your archived messages are
covered by copyright...but the archives are deemed FAIR USE:
**********
Licenses implied by circumstances.
Fair use is a legal license conferred by the statute. However, licenses
may also be implied by context. Writers who post messages to public
e-mail lists should contemplate, for example, both forwarding and
archiving. It is reasonable to assume that they have given permission
unless it is explicitly denied.
One Web site asserts that list owners have the right to approve the
forwarding of e-mail from one list to another. Yet, barring a rule
applicable to a particular list, I am aware of no legal basis for it.
On the contrary, one would not expect members of most e-mail lists to
object if their messages are forwarded to others likely to be
interested.
Likewise, few who post to public lists would object to having their
messages archived. Archiving clearly serves the interests of members
who may occasionally want to revisit topics addressed earlier. Indeed,
most would prefer that to seeing topics rehashed--the reason one often
sees lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs) with answers.
Can writers revoke permission once granted, say for messages they later
wish had not been sent? Circumstances that would warrant a revocation
of an implied license are surely rare. Courts generally do not favor
imposing unreasonable obligations on others. Because list owners cannot
recall messages once distributed, authors should be careful what they
post.
One more caveat is in order about implied licenses to use other's
postings: If you forward a message or use part of one in responding, do
not change the author's meaning. No one implies permission to attribute
embarrassing (or worse) messages they did not write!
*********
The above was quoted from
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-01/field.html ...copyrighted by them,
of course.
No one changed or altered the OP's information. No one is trying to
profit from it. No one is claiming copyright on it. It would appear
to be fair use to archive or mirror the material!
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