If Yahoo! does this board in

Message ID: 223408
Posted By: cat_herder_5263
Posted On: 2005-01-14 19:27:00
Subject: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

It's been great knowing and associating with all of you.

Anybody got an archive? I'd hate to lose some of these stellar opinion pieces.

=^^=

Message ID: 223465
Posted By: spamsux99
Posted On: 2005-01-14 23:18:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

Yep, got an archive from day 1, although it cannot be republished or distributed due to yahoo licensing restrictions and complaints from the groklaw crowd.

I would suggest if you want archived copies you need to a) state under this thread that you grant permission to me to redistribute/republish your comments, or b) download yasuck from http://badpenguins.com/source/yasuck and archive your own posts :)

Message ID: 223469
Posted By: ColonelZen
Posted On: 2005-01-14 23:46:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

Spam, I'm already on record that my posts are ccl/nc, and I expand that to ccl/sa as well and I'm not up to date and a bit busy now. I'd appreciate if you could keep the archive, and if Y burns send mine to me.

Thanks! -- TWZ

Message ID: 223470
Posted By: cat_herder_5263
Posted On: 2005-01-14 23:47:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

spamsux99 - you have permission to redistribute/republish my comments.

=^^=

Message ID: 223472
Posted By: br3nsc
Posted On: 2005-01-15 00:00:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

spamsux99
you have my permission for br3nsc and b29651
br3n

Message ID: 223475
Posted By: ruidhmurphy
Posted On: 2005-01-15 00:05:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

>> I would suggest if you want archived copies you need to a) state under this thread that you grant permission to me to redistribute/republish your comments, or b) <<

OK to republish mine.

Do I have to reply using each of my "troll" accounts as well?

Message ID: 223476
Posted By: cat_herder_5263
Posted On: 2005-01-15 00:11:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

----------------8< Quote >8----------------
Do I have to reply using each of my "troll" accounts as well?
----------------8< Quote> 8----------------

Stange you should ask ... I was thinking the same thing. Maybe something best done in private?

=^^=

Message ID: 223498
Posted By: spamsux99
Posted On: 2005-01-15 01:55:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

Heh heh, that would definitely be a YES. Keeping up with all of the multinyms would be a nightmare :)

Message ID: 223499
Posted By: spamsux99
Posted On: 2005-01-15 01:56:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

It would be best, of course, to have the permission granted in the actual archives.

Just login as your troll nym and pretend you have no idea who the other nym is :)

Message ID: 223502
Posted By: mcbride4prison
Posted On: 2005-01-15 02:34:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

Mine too.

For all that's worth.

Message ID: 223505
Posted By: boyle_m_owl
Posted On: 2005-01-15 04:10:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

You have my permission to archive all my stuff from here, DejaNews, and wherever else you can find my public opinion (yes, even bbs.shadesofblue.org...yes, a WWIV board).

If you could even go back in time and get all my old BBS postings from Grendel's Den, Rising Sun, LOCnet, HOInet, and all the 1200/300bps BBSes in all their Apple //, Commodore, TRS80, and IBM glory, then please do. I miss the ability to count the idiots on one hand. I miss the BBS picnics. I miss cliff diving at Ft Wetherill in Jamestown RI with fellow insane-types. I miss Rock&Bowl 7 bux/all night bowling. I miss Network Steering Committee meetings at Casey's Pub.

Please, archive my stuff, for someday I may want to see it again.

--
BMO

Message ID: 223515
Posted By: truth_in_government
Posted On: 2005-01-15 09:02:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

You want to call my conversational blather "copyrightable"? This "IP" nonsense has gone too far. You have permission, along with rights to my trademark misspellings and patented poor syntax and grammar.

I knew I should have kept lurking and shut my fingers.

Message ID: 223517
Posted By: peragirn
Posted On: 2005-01-15 09:09:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

>> This "IP" nonsense has gone too far. You have permission, along with rights to my trademark misspellings and patented poor syntax and grammar.<<

This is why we are here. Stupid people thinking IP actually exists and aren't afriad of bullying people.

Now the question is to whom am I refering? Don't answer. Really Don't Answer.

Message ID: 223523
Posted By: scox_on_the_rox
Posted On: 2005-01-15 09:39:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

All of my posts may be used with proper attribution and without any other restriction. In general, I post under this nym when I have a direct financial interest in SCOX's failure and under my krow10 nym when I don't (though initially I did post under the krow10 nym for a while while short.) I've also done some pathetic TFAD/satire attempts under the tortillao nym --- woooooooooooooowwwwww!!!!!

BTW, I'd like to take this chance to note that cdbaric was within s/h/its legal rights to be a complete and utter fugghead and screw up Andy's site for everyone else by asserting copyright; and I grant full and exclusive credit to s/h/it for doing so.

-sotr

Message ID: 223528
Posted By: heimdal31
Posted On: 2005-01-15 10:10:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

<< a) state under this thread that you grant permission to me to redistribute/republish your comments,>>

I've said it before, but I give permission to anyone to redistribute or republish all Yahoo Finance posts--on this board or others.

Message ID: 223536
Posted By: sonofnergal
Posted On: 2005-01-15 11:11:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

It looks yahoo's message boards have recovered from their amnesia. I had worried last night that all of the research that has been done on this board would be lost.

Even though yahoo hosts these boards and may claim to own the contents there in, I post here under the conviction that my words are public and can be used by the public (misspellings, mistypings, and assorted ramblings included).

If anyone needs my consent to copy and repost what I have put on this or other yahoo boards, you have it. Not that it's worth much, I looked at Warmcat's yahoo board (thanks warmcat) and my highest rec'ed post was for the 419 Darl letter I posted.

Message ID: 223537
Posted By: diogenese19348
Posted On: 2005-01-15 11:19:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

You have my permission to redistribute also with one small caveat: I retain the sole right to commercially distribute any Flagon stories, including any I have posted here.

Specifically you may distribute them as part of the yahoo board (it’s why I put them here to start with) but I am the only one allowed to get the rejection letters from the publishers for them (grin)

-Dio

Message ID: 223547
Posted By: crunchie812
Posted On: 2005-01-15 11:53:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

<< Even though yahoo hosts these boards and may claim to own the contents there in, I post here under the conviction that my words are public and can be used by the public (misspellings, mistypings, and assorted ramblings included).>>

I question whether copyright can be asserted for anonymous posts. I consider posting under a nym to be anonymous, even under an 'established' nym.

crunchie812 is nobody. I have no legal claim to the name. Even though it is easy enough to find out who I am that I have gotten postcards addressed to 'crunchie812', I have made no effort to make the nym a legal alias.

Stealing the nym 'crunchie812' for use elsewhere, or using crunchie812's immortal words without attribution may be scummy, but that is all. Some of my posts have been quoted on other sites with attribution, but no one has ever contacted me for permission. I would be silly for them to do so.

If you want to assert copyright, sign your posts with your real name or a legal alias.

IANAL, etc.

Message ID: 223562
Posted By: span1sh1nqu1s1t1on
Posted On: 2005-01-15 12:59:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

No, posters owning their posts is why GL can't be indexed.

Message ID: 223577
Posted By: crunchie812
Posted On: 2005-01-15 13:52:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

<< No, posters owning their posts is why GL can't be indexed.>>

No, that is the reason given. GrokLaw as whole is much like the Unix copyright problem. It would be a logistical and technical nightmare to separate what is copyrightable in the first place from what is not, who owns what, etc. Its a matter of expedience.

The question is, do people posting under an assumed name to a public forum have a legal right to assert copyright control over those posts?

To those who sign their posts with a legal name or alias, I would say yes. To the others I would say no. By posting under a nym there is the implication that you do not want to publicly take personal responsibility for your words. To then turn around and want to assert ownership control without stepping up and identifying themselves is absurd (IMHO).

Message ID: 223579
Posted By: ColonelZen
Posted On: 2005-01-15 14:05:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

Once again I am not a lawyer, but I think you're a bit off base here.

Our system of injustice is adversarial. You have no rights until/unless you assert them. And they are assertable and contestable up until a judge says yea or nay. (Of course third parties, may act in their own interest regarding their own property based upon those assertions before anything gets to a judge).

If a particular poster can prove, or copyright being a civil matter, establish a "likelyhood" (whatever the legal terminology is) that he wrote a post, with sufficient matter to warrant copyright protection in the first place, then his copyright is likely to be upheld. (IMO).

-- TWZ

Message ID: 223594
Posted By: span1sh1nqu1s1t1on
Posted On: 2005-01-15 14:27:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

Usernames are considered pseudonyms. People using their online pseudonym have just as much right to their copyrights as people using a pseudonym in other forms of media like newspapers or books. Take Mark Twain, which of course wasn't his real name, but he didn't consign his work to the public domain simply because he used a pseudonym. In his day, I wouldn't consider it absurd for Samuel Clemens to have asserted ownership of his copyrighted works despite him using the pen name of Mark Twain.

Message ID: 223629
Posted By: mck9@swbell.net
Posted On: 2005-01-15 16:24:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

>> No, posters owning their posts is why GL can't be indexed.<<

Not quite. Posters' ownership of their comments presumably makes it legally impossible to *mirror* their comments without their permission, insofar as their comments are copyrightable in the first place. Indexing is another matter.

I shall sidestep the issue of whether you can own copyright under a nym, and the issue of what a comment must contain in order to be protectable under copyright law. I think the answer to the first question is "yes," and the answer to the second is "not much", but I am not a lawyer.

Indexing the comments (as warmcat once proposed to do) would not entail copying the comments, and therefore would not violate any copyrights on the comments, regardless of who owned them, or whether anybody owned them.

Message ID: 223635
Posted By: span1sh1nqu1s1t1on
Posted On: 2005-01-15 16:36:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

"Comments on Groklaw are copyrighted and no one may copy, modify, reproduce, index (including comment message numbers and thread pointers), or distribute the comments from this site or deep link to comments on this site without permission."

Message ID: 223648
Posted By: mck9@swbell.net
Posted On: 2005-01-15 17:43:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

I'm not sure what your point is. PJ's pronouncements can turn an infringement into a non-infringement (by granting a license), but they cannot turn a non-infringement into an infringement.

An index cannot infringe the copyright on a comment without copying the comment, wholly or in part.

I don't know exactly what warmcat was proposing to do, but I gather that he was *not* proposing to republish the comments from his own web site, but only to provide some kind of search facility that would respond with links to Groklaw.

If the index provided searches only by date, author, and title, then it would not contain any copyrightable expressive content.

Things get more complicated if the index were to provide searches by key words and phrases -- e.g. to find all the comments containing the phrase "Blepp's briefcase". In order to support such a search, the index would have to include the entire contents of each comment in some form. In practice the contents would probaby be scrambled in some complex data structure in order to support efficient searches, but at least in principle it would probably be possible to reconstruct each comment in its entirety.

As long as the comment is not republished in its complete, reconstructed form, the only copying going on is the copying necessary for construction of the index. If that sort of copying is copyright infringement, then Google and all its competitors are guilty of copyright infringement on a colossal scale.

Conclusion: copyright law is no impediment to the construction of an index, though it may impose constraints on how the indexed material is presented.

If there is a legal impediment to indexing, it must rest on other grounds. PJ has fallen back on the concept of trespass upon chattels. It's hard for me to imagine how accessing a publically available website through the normal http protocols could be construed as trespass, as long as the access did not consume excessive bandwidth. However this discussion is straying far afield from the original point, and in any case I am not a lawyer.

Message ID: 223688
Posted By: ColonelZen
Posted On: 2005-01-16 03:20:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

I've heard conflicting info. A long time back someone lost a case against IBM having something to do with a database IBM used in one of its products. A competitor was able to launch a product which recreated the pertinent aspects of that database for the customer by issuing commands, capturing the results, and building their own db containing almost the same info as the IBM product db.

So there was precedent for a while that collective information in a database of specific purpose was copyrightable and protectable.

In following some of the threads it seems there have been other cases which went the other way, so I'm not sure where things stand now.

Trespass of chattels always sounded laughable in the general case on an open, no login required web site, but *may* have been applicable in a specific case (Andy) having been specifically denied permission. It's similar to having an "open to the public" sign on a restaraunt and yet it's trespass if someone specifically banned for past ill behavior comes in without additional permissions. A judge *could* extend that to specific intents, but I'd be skeptical. Of course I'd want to have some cash lying around to feed hungry lawyers, just in case, before trying it.

IANAL. May shrink if washed in hot water.

-- TWZ

Message ID: 223738
Posted By: mck9@swbell.net
Posted On: 2005-01-16 12:03:00
Subject: Re: If Yahoo! does this board in ...

>>
A long time back someone lost a case against IBM having something to do with a database IBM used in one of its products. A competitor was able to launch a product which recreated the pertinent aspects of that database for the customer by issuing commands, capturing the results, and building their own db containing almost the same info as the IBM product db.

So there was precedent for a while that collective information in a database of specific purpose was copyrightable and protectable.
<<

It's hard to comment without knowing more about the particulars. If the database in question stored text -- such as help screens or manuals -- the text would be just as protectable by copyright as if it had been printed on paper. If it stored part numbers, prices, and technical specs, the expressive content would be minimal at best.

The general principle is that facts are not copyrightable. I'm thinking in particular of the Feist case in Kansas. Feist Publications (an independent publisher of telephone directories) won the right to publish telephone listings without permission from the telco, which had published the same listings in its own directory. See:

h++p://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm

Feist combined the telco's listings with listings from other sources, and in some cases provided street addresses not available from the telco's directory. If Feist had merely reprinted the telco's directory with little or no modification, the decision would probably have gone the other way.

From the Feist decision: "This case concerns the interaction of two well-established propositions. The first is that facts are not copyrightable; the other, that compilations of facts generally are." It goes on to remark:

"There is an undeniable tension between these two propositions. Many compilations consist of nothing but raw data -- i. e., wholly factual information not accompanied by any original written expression. On what basis may one claim a copyright in such a work? Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place. Yet copyright law seems to contemplate that compilations that consist exclusively of facts are potentially within its scope."

How to reconcile these two propositions in a particular case will always be a judgement call.

If warmcat had indexed only skeletal information such as names, titles, and message ids, without storing the content of the comments in any form, he would not violate any copyrights on the comments. It is arguable that he might violate PJ's copyright on the skeletal information as a compilation, but that has nothing to do with the ownership of the comments.

The texts of these Yahoo Message Board posts have been licensed for copying and distribution by Yahoo Message Board users "cat_herder_5263", "spamsux99", "ColonelZen", "br3nsc", "ruidhmurphy", "mcbride4prison", "boyle_m_owl", "truth_in_government", "peragirn", "scox_on_the_rox", "heimdal31", "sonofnergal", "diogenese19348", "crunchie812", "span1sh1nqu1s1t1on", "mck9@swbell.net" under the following license: License: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.