favor

Ted Mittelstaedt tedm at toybox.placo.com
Fri Feb 4 19:15:39 PST 2005



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Chris Hodgins
> Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 2:17 PM
> To: Erik Norgaard
> Cc: questions at freebsd.org; vandrewlevich at momsandkids.org
> Subject: Re: favor
> 
> 
> No.  You could however request that your own pages/articles 
> are removed 
> as you would be the legal copyright holder for those.....I think. ;)
> 

No actually you can't, you don't have legal basis for this.

If you post on a public forum, by implication you are giving that
forum permission to publish your copyrighted material.  Since at the
time of publication of that post, the FreeBSD mailing list was being
archived, you also by implication gave your permission for FreeBSD to
put it into their archives.  These are first publication rights and
once you give them out you cannot get them back, because after
publication they don't exist any longer.

By analogy, I write a book and give Addison Wesley permission to
publish it, well I can get the rights to -future- publication back
from them (if I pay them) but for the books that are out there, the
purchasers of them have a legal right to possess copies of my
work, regardless of whether I have changed my mind or not, since they
purchased the book when AW still had rights to publish.

The only thing that Valerie Andrewlevich, as a copyright holder
of her posts, can do is block 3rd parties such as Google or other
search engines from re-publishing her copyrighted material - ie:
her post - becase in her initial post back in 2003 she never gave
permission for Google to republish her material, and Google and other
search engines all republish under Fair Use doctrine.  (which
basically means you cannot sue them for publishing your work
as long as they stop publication the second you inform them
that their rights to publish under Fair Use are terminated,
and as long as they have published in a way that doesen't
slander or otherwise impunge your good name)

And of course, all of this goes out the window if the use of
the copyright is for satire - as the courts have held that satire
is constitutionally protected, and that it's reasonable to assume
that a satirist would never be able to get permission from a 
copyright holder to publish their work.

Which means I can say Valerie sounds like her kids aren't keeping
her busy enough as she has so much time for looking at search
engines, followed by an excerpt of her original post, and I
have legal right to do it and she has no right to stop me, because
such a statement is satire and thus protected.

> 
> I think the point the OP was trying to make is that he would not like 
> those posts to appear at all. :)
>

He is a She, unless Valerie has suddenly become a boy's name, and
she quite obviously shows a shocking lack of knowledge about how
much effort that she is asking the archive manager to go to, just
to satisfy her ego.

I might also point out that that list of churches on www.momsandkids.org
is also undoubtedly published under Fair Use, I doubt the site managers
got permission from every one of those churches to link to them.  I
sure hope she isn't affiliated with them - sauce for the goose and all
that, you know.

Ted


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