[ih] Archive of internet-history email (and others)

[touch at strayalpha.com]

Hi, all,

I agree with most of the stuff below - I don’t claim to “own” the site, but I am the one “publishing” it, as the one who created the list and manages it, and (where possible) defends it.

Posting your own stuff or portions seems like fair use, but publishing the whole thing out - AFAICT - to include a request to do so from the current publisher.

Ease of use doesn’t make what they did - without asking - right, in my book. Just like distributing magnified copies of a whole book isn’t a justification just because it’s easier to read.

Licklider had a vision for threads that connected cards in a card catalog, not one where a whole set of new cards were copied from the first to make that web. LINKING to our site doesn’t require permission, but (IMO, IANAL) *copying* it and *posting it* should.

Joe

—
Dr. Joe Touch, temporal epistemologist
www.strayalpha.com

> On Mar 6, 2025, at 6:55 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Narkive says "If you find content on Narkive that you find discriminatory against you, please send us an email <mailto:abuses at narkive.com> and we will evaluate it to be removed. "   See https://narkive.com/legalese#
> 
> OTOH, there are legal questions that I certainly don't know how to answer.  E.g., who owns the material posted on the list?  Who owns the messages which contain long chains of previous messages or "digests"?  When we "signed up" for internet-history, what, if anything, did we agree to?  Does ISOC have legal rights to the content?      Same questions for the other archive content, e.g., all the newsgroups   Any intellectual property lawyers on the list - it's an international issue, not just a US one?
> 
> In any event, I've already found the Narkive repository to be much more usable than the ISOC one.  Having long conversations sorted into threads is much easier to use than lots of folders organized by dates.  Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any kind of "search" or "filter" capability.
> 
> A little history -- Back in the mid-70s, Lick (Licklider) had a vision of human-human communications which included the ability for "important" content to be copied to The Datacomputer, where it could be accessible, and even searchable, for posterity.  Lick thought that archives, and other such mechanisms from the non-digital world such as escrow, verified sending and delivery, trusted third-parties, distribution lists, et al were important to implement in the new digital world.  I wrote the code to do that for our own email system.   Such capability was deferred in the overall network until the "next" version of mail protocols, with focus shifted to a "simple" interim protocol (SMTP).
> 
> After 50 years now, I doubt such stuff will ever happen.
> 
> Jack
> 
> 
> 
> On 3/6/25 17:59, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
>> It appears that touch--- via Internet-history<touch at strayalpha.com>  said:
>>> I know it isn’t authorized, but then neither is the wayback machine.
>> Well, somewone was feeding it messages from the list's predecessor.  The
>> archive stops six years ago, I'm guessing when it moved to ISOC.
>> 
>>> IANAL, but it’s times like this I wish we had one on retainer…
>> If you really don't want a copy at narkive, write him a reasonably polite
>> letter and I expect he'll delete it.
>> 
>> R's,
>> John
> 
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