[ih] The Well - "You own your own words"

[Joly MacFie]

A liitle off-topic, but since it's been mentioned

I only had a brief experience on The Well in the early 90's before
graduating fo the wide open spaces of the nascent WWW. One of the first
things I noticed was that everyone had a neat little sayings in their sigs,
I forget the term for them. Since my steady income at the time was selling
punk buttons off a stall at NYC concerts (pin money!), I immediately
commented that many of these sayings would make excellent buttons.  I was
immediately snapped at by a zealous gatekeeper in strident terms along the
lines of DON'T EVEN THINK OF COPYING ANYTHING YOU MIGHT SEE HERE!, citing
The Well's credo "You own your own words".

Coming from the free and easy world of the old hippie underground press
syndicate and punk rock anarchy where it was taken for granted that
everyone shared an ethic of "supporting the scene" and viral culture. I was
a little taken aback at the vehemence of this, and didn't bother hanging
around.

It was later that I came to further look into the principles of copyright -
that I had previously so blithely ignored. I eventually discovered the
commerce clause, which essentially boils down to the same "supporting the
scene" principle, the scene being science and the useful arts.

But to the point. How did "You own your own words." come about? And how did
it fare once conversation moved to the wider Internet?

j

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