[ih] Cluster Addressing and CIDR

[Ted Faber]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 04:53:55PM -0500, David P. Reed wrote:
> Fair use is explicitly part of copyright law.   History is clearly a policy 
> goal of fair use.   IANAL, but I would expect that there is precedent 
> protecting people who share personal archives of documents for the purpose 
> of historical research.

Fair use is deep water with dangerous currents.  I'm not a lawyer,
either, but I wouldn't try to assert a fair use claim in the face of
opposition without one either.

I'd want to see that precedent before I'd rely on there being one.  More
to the point, I'd want my laywer to see that precedent.

Keeping a private collection of documents and allowing specific people
access to them for historical puproses is one thing, making a collection
of documents publically available is another.  Anything intended to be
detected by Google feels more like the former than the latter to me.
The UCLA film library can't start showing their copyrighted films to the
general public on a regular basis no matter how noble or scholarly their
intent.
> 
> Just a reminder from someone dedicated to educating people that copyright 
> includes rights of fair use, as well as other exceptions.   Electronic 
> rights are complex, as well.  The Internet crosses jurisdictions, and 
> documents such as IDs are published in many locations at once, so the right 
> to "unpublish" is determined by jurisdiction.

It's not at all clear to me that the idea of unpublishing has been
legally tested.  I don't know if there's any legal precedent at all.
For all I know, the very idea of unpublishing something may well be a
nonsense idea in the legal world.  I'd love to see a relevant legal
citation.

I'm just worrying about the US system, though you are correct that the
Internet situation is even more complex.

> 
> IMO, standing behind copyright really distorts the issue of desirable 
> dissemination of knowledge and scientific knowledge, in particular.

Perhaps, but cranky ID authors are not the primary problem in this
regard.  Many conferences and journals also enforce copyright on
scientific knowledge.

More practically, if people are concerned about keeping the majority of
the IDs available, the simplest tack is not to futz with the lawyers,
but to get the IDs, set up a website and make them available.  When an
ID expires (a situation detectable with a perl script) mail the author
(their e-mail address is also part of the ID) and request permission to
archive the thing.  If the author says OK, you leave the copy up
(perhaps appending a notice that the expired draft appears with the
author's permission), otherwise you delete the draft.  The whole thing
can be largely automated (including the author's reply for prolific
authors).  I suspect that the negative responses would be very few.

Results: ID's (other than authors who'd be a pain about it anyway)
legally archived in the web for posterity, and I don't have to hear this
argument for the one thousand and first time.
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