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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada

Re: Legal issues with mailing lists.

From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk_-at-_chinet.com>
To: flora-admin-help_-at-_flora.org
Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 13:28:14 -0500 (CDT)

At 12:40pm -0400, 05/16/03, Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca> wrote:
>On Fri, 16 May 2003, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

>>"Public domain" doesn't mean "public forum".

>  Please recognize that I have spent the last few years immersed in
>copyright consultation processes, including a number of submissions to the
>Government of Canada.
>  http://www.flora.ca/copyright-2001.shtml

Yes, I've read this before, but you don't seem to have mailing lists in mind.

>>The author of an email message sent to a mailing list is published when
>>distributed; the author has copyright at that point. If he wishes to, he may
>>include it in an article he's written for a journal. No one else may.

>  Unless there is an agreement, this is the case.

I think our bigger disagreement is that any sort of agreement between you and a
list subscriber could possibly exist defining the specific rights of one party
and the specific duties of the other party.

>  Please talk about this with other list managers, or co-administrators as
>is the case for PEDNET.

This doesn't concern Chris or me, per se. This would be of concern to a number
of subscribers. We get messages posted to Pednet that range from chatty to what
could be considered a proto message for a scholarly article. Several of our
subscribers have their own Web sites, some of which are quite elaborate,
especially Todd Litman's VTPI site. They would not agree that posting an
article in an email message to Pednet means that they've given consent to
having that article republished in an unrelated media.

>This agreement is not going to apply to all past archives on FLORA.org, just
>those that will still exist on FLORA.org in the future.  If the list managers
>for any list, including PEDNET, would not feel comfortable agreeing to the
>final agreement then the opportunity to move the list off of FLORA.org will
>exist.

I think this would have a chilling effect on posts from certain subscribers.

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