On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 06:21:43PM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote: > On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 06:35:13PM -0500, Allister MacLeod wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 10:12:05AM -0800, Rob Reid wrote: > Mark Twain > > Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling > -- > Jeff Kinz, Open-PC, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA. jkinz@xxxxxxxx > copyright 2003. Use is restricted. Any use is an > acceptance of the offer at http://www.kinz.org/policy.html. > Don't forget to change your password often. Exactly what part of that post is copyright by Jeff Kinz? Most of the post is in the public domain, save Rob's and Allister's quotes, which are implicitely copyright by their respective original posters. What's more, the combination of the quotes and the public-domain passage makes perfect sense without the single sentence that you can claim a copyright on. Please don't include copyright notices that attempt to steal others' work, since doing so is fraud at best, and outright theft at worst. Another point to note concerning your copyright notice: It's at the end of the message, so the bulk of your contract is entirely unenforceable, as your email address was already extracted long before reaching the copyright notice. Furthermore, the terms of use of the message itself are conveniently omitted from the contract (so it'd be up to the court to rule whether all rights are implicitely granted by the lack of restrictions, or whether the implicit all rights reserved stays - either way, the remainder here holds); rather, the contract simply attempts to assert that your address is copyright, which is rather silly, since anybody's fair use rights would allow him to send you mail - junk or other - by simply refusing to accept the contract (the "offer"); since I've already read the message before even being informed of the fact that use is restricted. (Note that just because somebody copyrights his postal address doesn't mean nobody can send him mail without accepting ridiculous terms, for instance. Your fair use rights allow you to make reference to copyright material, and the only reference to an address is itself - be it a postal address or an email address.) Now, since my fair use rights allow me to quote small portions of your mail in my replies without accepting any license whatsoever, I'm free to quote and reply to your posts on-list, off-list, or virtually anywhere else without accepting your contract. The net result is that your copyright notice simply adds confusion by attempting to lie to people about their rights. - Dave -- Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor? It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right? Please visit this link: http://rotter.net/israel Portions copyright (C) 2003 Dave Cohen. Permission granted to reproduce this work in any medium, provided this copyright notice is preserved intact.
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