Re: Where is the Searchable Applescript-users Archive?
Re: Where is the Searchable Applescript-users Archive?
- Subject: Re: Where is the Searchable Applescript-users Archive?
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 17:24:35 -0500
on 3/5/01 1:36 PM, Chuq Von Rospach at email@hidden wrote:
>
There is absolutely no question that it is NOT public domain. None at all.
>
It's not. Period. Under any interpretation of the copyright codes. The only
>
question is what qualifies under "fair use", and what the acceptable usage
>
of the archives under our terms of service are. And I guess I need to go
>
make those explicit (sigh), to save having these discussions in the future.
Chuq, you can only be that sure of the answer if you are NOT a copyright
lawyer. When you actually litigate copyright issues in court as a lawyer (as
I have done), you learn humility real quick. The answers are rarely clear,
until the judge tells you what the answers are and his ruling survives all
appeals.
For example, the U.S. Supreme Court says that anybody can copy the
information in the telephone book and publish it themselves, if they want
to. Same goes for all similar collections of data. It doesn't matter that it
cost the first publisher a lot of money to compile the information.
According to the Supreme Court, it isn't a matter of fair use at all, but of
whether the information is copyrightable in the first place. The phone book
isn't. Where the line gets drawn, as a collection of data becomes more
"original" or "creative," is hard to determine, and there have been a lot of
court decisions on that question in the years since the key Supreme Court
decision. There is at least a reasonable question whether a mechanically
(electronically) assembled collection of e-mail posts by multiple authors is
copyrightable at all.
You can certainly clarify the situation by writing some rules into the
"contract" we all become subject to by using the list. But even that won't
nail it down for certain. And if you go overboard, you will discourage
participation by those of us who take contracts seriously.
Bear in mind, in writing the contract, that many of us (presumably all of
us) contribute to the list for the very purpose of making our communications
public. I, for one, hope that anything I say on the lists that has value is
disseminated as widely as possible. As for my e-mail address, I make it
public in order to encourage others to communicate with me. My spam filter
and my thick skin work pretty well to keep out the undesirables. In posting
a message to this list, I certainly do NOT intend to give Apple Computer a
copyright in what I said. If you write a contract that purports to give
Apple exclusive ownership of what I said, I'll stop participating. So please
exercise restraint. If you have to assert Apple's ownership of a copyright
in the list, please limit Apple's claim of ownership to the collection as a
whole, not the individual pieces of it that were contributed by individuals.
--
Bill Cheeseman, Quechee, Vermont <
mailto:email@hidden>
The AppleScript Sourcebook
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