From: gbnewby@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Gregory B. Newby) Subject: Re: Postings on sci.virtual-worlds and Copyright Protection Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1991 16:05:52 GMT Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY In article <1991Aug7.004148.17684@milton.u.washington.edu> esz001@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Will Overington) writes: >>In article <1991Aug5.191444.12583@milton.u.washington.edu>, >cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) writes: > >>It's been brought to my attention, as moderator, that material which has >>been posted to sci.virtual-worlds is beginning to show up in various >>... etc... >Whilst grateful to you bringing this up, and, indeed grateful that >... etc... >I wonder what the legal position really is over copyright. > >However, under English law, copyright exists in something merely by the >act of writing it. This applies to software too. Here's the issue: It's not been resolved in US courts whether email and other forms of electronic communication are TEXT or SPEECH. The laws for both are different. As TEXT, anything you write is immediately copyrighted, just as in England. As SPEECH, what you say is NOT copyrighted (I'm not sure if it even can be easily copyrighted). It seems intuitive that email, BBS, Usenet, mailing lists, interactive messages, and so forth are all forms of TEXT. After all, we write them using a keyboard, don't we? But in other regards, we really want these forms of communication to be SPEECH. What's the first line of defense when someone flames us? "Hey, I can *say* what I want - the First Ammendment guarantees free *speech*." [emphasis added] There's just about no case law in the US at all on this. There are a few cases before the courts currently, which I think you'll find discussion of in forums such as alt.society.cu-digest and comp.org.eff. For the cases I know about, they have to do with an employer looking at an employee's mail messages or BBS postings, and the employee charging invasion of privacy. (The better publicized cases have to do with the Secret Service committing illegal search and seizure -- I'm referring to the Craig Neisdorf case -- this doesn't seem to directly relate.) In these privacy/employer cases, the issue is, you guessed it: freedom of SPEECH. The employee is using the same basis for his/her argument as for illegal tapping of telephone conversations. An aspect of the Secret Service cases (discussed very fully in alt.society.cu-digest) has to do with electronically published newsletters. PHRACK (sp?) does not exist on paper at all, and was confiscated entirely when all computers and media were confiscated. What about publications that *do* exist on paper? Without going into more detail, the issue here is that PHRACK was not treated as a publication (as in, TEXT). The problem is that US copyright law (which was derived from English copyright law, at least for the TEXT part) distinguishes between TEXT and SPEECH. For these emerging forms of electronically-mediated communication, the distinction breaks down. Case law will eventually answer these issues, but I think we're in for at least several more years of uncertainty. No, I'm not a lawyer. I am a scholar of human communication, info transfer, and computer networking, tho. -- Greg Newby School of Information Studies School of Library and Information Science Syracuse University U. of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign gbnewby@rodan.acs.syr.edu gbnewby@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu (until 8/21) (after 8/21) "Curiouser and curiouser" - Alice COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This message may be copyrighted in your country. Permission is granted for this message or parts of it to be distributed, provided that proper credit is given to the author and provided that no profits are made by the distribution without permission of the author. -- -- Greg Newby School of Information Studies gbnewby@rodan.acs.syr.edu Syracuse University gbnewby@sunrise.bitnet "Curiouser and curiouser" -Alice