On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 08:08:14PM -0500, David Phillips wrote: > You're right. You can. Just like I can make and distribute copies of > Windows. But that doesn't make it legal. How does this pertain to the current discussion? Did Microsoft publish a copy of Windows in a public forum? > Think about it this way: The creator of a work holds the copyright. What > rights you have to use that work are determined by copyright law. You need > to think about why you have a right to do something, not why it could be > illegal. And once you've released something into the public domain you can't simply change your mind and retract it. > > The real question is this: What gives me the right to publish someone else's > copyrighted work? If you stand up in the middle of a group of people to make a statement, and that meeting is being videotaped, do you think you have any right to demand that anyone with a copy of that video tape erase the parts in which you participated? It's essentially the same thing. The person making the request in this case has joined a public forum, that they were well aware is archived, and indexed by search engines. This person made a statement that [for some reason] they wish to retract. Now, do you think that _any_ court would order a [large] group of people to erase portions of a recording made in public on the whim of a person who made a statement they wish to essentially erase? If it were possible, former president Clinton would be demanding that everyone erase their copy of the 'No, I did not have sex with that woman' statements. Trent Lott would have immediately demanded that nobody repeat his copyrighted works from Strom Thurmond's birthday event. Point: You have to think before you speak, and be prepared to have it follow you around for the rest of your life, maybe longer. > That question can likely only be answered adequately by your attorney and > ultimately by the courts. Common sense can go a long way though. > -- > David Phillips <david at acz.org> > http://david.acz.org/ -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list