On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 08:47:38PM -0500, Sam TH wrote: > > But then, Tivo's remove television as a broadcast medium. The > technical details involved in sending a message to lots of people are > likely irrelevant from a legal perspective. If you watch TV on your > computer, and the broadcast is streamed to disk before being displayed > (yeah, I know that would be a bad idea) is that more like email or > more like TV? > Yes, but copies made by a TiVo device are made at the direction of the TiVo user, not at the direction of the broadcaster. > Yeah, but you leave out "sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, > lease, or lending". That might well make the difference. > You can't claim any physical property rights to the copy of your mail message that is on my hard disk as a result of you requesting its creation for me. While you may own the copyright, I own the copy. > I'm not saying that this is a good system, just that copyright law is > defintely gray on this point. > If you give something away to someone, you have transferred physical property rights to that person. In the words of 17 USC 101, an "other transfer of ownership" has occured. If you're giving copies away to members of the general public, like the subscribers of this list, then you've published your work. 17 USC 101 seems clear on this point. Salinger v. Random House deals with citing unpublished private communication for profit and against the terms of a non-disclosure agreement. Neither an expectation of privacy nor a non-disclosure agreement exists on these public mailing lists. -- Brian Ristuccia brian@ristuccia.com bristucc@cs.uml.edu
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