On February 13, 2010 at 12:12 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu) wrote:
On Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:02:48 +0800, "Wilkinson, Alex" said:
IMPORTANT: This email remains the property of the Australian Defence Organisation
Have fun trying to enforce that after posting to a public mailing list in North America, with recipients all over the world. Care to cite any relevant legal basis for the claim that would hold outside Australia?
I know I'm an idiot to respond to this BUT part of the implication of copyright ownership is: A) that the text is protected specifically BECAUSE it is or will be published. So why would publishing it work against that? Posting it to a public mailing list would seem to imply some agreement to free redistribution, archiving, etc. but that's only a small subset of rights under copyright which leads me to... B) One aim is that the text is not defaced. Imagine I took the quotation above from your note and inserted expletives, perhaps racist epithets, keeping the indication that it was your text I was quoting. Do you believe you would have a complaint? What if doing that got you fired or otherwise harmed you in a reasonably measurable way. Now, how could you follow up on a complaint without some notion that those original words were at some point owned by you? Etc. IANAL, but it doesn't strike me as half as preposterous as you say. -- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*