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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada
From: Russell McOrmond <russell_-at-_flora.ca>
To: flora-admin-help_-at-_flora.org
Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 13:13:29 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 16 May 2003 fireweed@gilanet.com wrote: > Of course, even law cannot completely protect an author from nutty people, > although it might offer payback in a court of law. In this case I want to protect myself from nutty authors ;-) I am a supporter of creative rights, which is a big part of my support for the Free Software movement which is a creative rights movement for software creators. I do believe, however, that a climate of excessive lawsuits and excessive claimed rights of certain special interests (largely eminating from our 'neighbours' to the south) has meant that there is a lot of confusion about what aspects of copyright are helpful to creators rights, and which ones are actually harmful. Like water, rights in copyright is something a creator can have both too little of and too much of. Anyone who thinks that "more copyright" is better for the protection of creative rights probably also can't tell the difference between dehydration and drowning. Note: This agreement is not about taking away or granting creators rights, or even concerns itself with creators rights. The purpose of the agreement is to in some way better protect me from legal liability for the ongoing activities of FLORA.org. > I wonder who will read the fine print if it gets too elaborate. But I would > welcome a common understanding in writing. People could refer back to it if > not read it upfront. This is one of the problems that exists with any online legal issue. Even click-through agreements are questionably enforceable, so an agreement that exists on a page (even if linked in a template available on the bottom of every other page) can be a problem. The question then becomes for those who want to try to sue me under legalistic terms: under what conditions did you have the right to use the FLORA.org computers in the first place? If you sue me for copyight infringement for having your message in archives, can I then counter-sue for theft of computing resources? > I am wondering what this all means for listserv founders and administrators > (the authors and parents of the lists, so to speak). Do they have rights to > the fruits of their own labor? If you were to purge an archive, for > instance, would you contact the founders and ask if they want to save those > archives first? If they want to assume the legal responsibility? Is it an > affront to the community to remove a potential library? Anyone who wants to assume legal liability can do so under their own name and domain. I even offer to host (commercially and in some cases sponsorship) to do so. As an example, if PEDNET wanted to move their archives from FLORA.org to ottawalk.org (Hosted on the same servers, but different liability) then that would solve that problem for that single list. The archives are already saved (in multiple places on the net), and if I (or a list manager) did delete archives they are definetely not gone from the net. The idea here is to not restrict the publication of messages, but to protect me from those who want to restrict the publication of messages. I don't want to be sued for doing what should have been understood that I was doing done right from the beginning. Curious: Did PEDNET get legal clearence when the old FTP files were moved to FLORA.org? Sounds like the PEDNET list admins should be the last people to expect there to be restrictive copyright on the list archives since the over-claim of rights from some posters had already been violated > I would love to have access to the list I started on Flora many years ago. > It was a beautiful thing, that discussion, and should be saved. > > Who has rights in that case? While other list managers/members may believe they should be able to sue us for it, I for one would be very happy if you logged in with the PEDNET FTP account and made multiple mirrors of all the archives. I would hate to see the archives lost as well, and while I don't want to be held legally liable for it, want to ensure that the archives are kept available in multiple media even if someone tries to sue people for it. It is also very informative to know about the archive of the archives at: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.flora.org/pednet/ I also encourage you (and everyone else) to look at tools such as http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html which allow you to make constructive use of the over-sided hard disks people have in their home computers. If you kept an up-to-date mirror of the /pednet/ archives, then you would always have them even if someone was able to successfully sue me and cause me to remove the site. > Pam --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> Governance software that controls ICT, automates government policy, or electronically counts votes, shouldn't be bought any more than politicians should be bought. -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/
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