Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1998 11:32:00 EDT
Reply-To: Thing Guy <ThingGuy@AOL.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <Vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: Thing Guy <ThingGuy@AOL.COM>
Subject: Copyrights - my take on it
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I had asked the list if any lawyers wanted to step forward and give their
opinions regarding the copyright issues and the CD copy of the archives.
No one has, so I took it upon myself to do a little research via the internet.
This is my opinion only, and I am not going to give specific references or
examples. Do your own search and reading and draw you own conclusions. I
have studied media law, but long before the internet was around. This is
still a very gray area concerning "fair use" on the internet, but my take on
this is that the CD is not a good idea unless you can get everyone's
permission who has ever posted.
Now under "fair use" you can make a copy of the archives to use for yourself
without any legal problems as long as you do not profit from it. Even the
mass distribution of copies would be legal, except if you were to undermine or
damage someone by doing so. For example, if Bob Hoover were to publish his
book, and sell copies, we would be undermining him if we were to mass produce
copies of his work even if we were not making money off of it. The same thing
goes for copying and distributing copyrighted music.
I had thought that an easy way around this issue would be to make the archives
easily downloadable, so that we could all make our own copies. This seems to
be a very gray area, and goes to what I said earlier, we could be undermining
Bob Hoover's book sales by doing so.
I think that the list should honor Bob's request to remove his sermons from
the archive, although it appears that as long as we maintain them in their
original form and maintain his copyright, we could keep them available legally
even without his permission, if he provided them with the full knowledge that
they would be archived, and available for viewing by the public. (my nonlegal
opinion)
I think that any effort to copy the list archives needs to be done off the
list, and without the assistance of the list administrators.
Here is a link to some interesting internet copyright information:
<A HREF="http://pilot.msu.edu/user/kimyong2/copy.htm">Copyright and Internet:
Social Claims and GoverÉ</A> or,
http://pilot.msu.edu/user/kimyong2/copy.htm
Sorry to be so long-winded on this. This is the last I will post on this to
the list, but would be happy to discuss further via p-mail.
Steve
