[ih] Internet Histories Volume 9, issue 3 is BS

[William Westfield]

> It's like any mailing list, surely.
> Your copyright is yours on anything you write.
> We are aware the mailing list archives are, rightly, available to be read, but that doesn't give anyone any rights to reproduce the material further.

Historically (back on topic?) this has been a feature and a plague on important pieces of internet history.

In theory, it might be nice to publish a book “collected thoughts from Human-Nets a seminal discussion of networking possibilities”, or “constructions hints from rec.models.rockets” or “historical bits of CS history gleaned from the SU-SAIL backup archive.”

But all that content is “copyright by the original authors”, many of whom were posting from school/university accounts with “anonymized” usernames , or otherwise essentially untraceable identities.  (Go ahead and ask UPenn who “westfw at wharton-10, circa 1980, actually was!)  So negotiating permission to publish “their” content in any new format is essentially impossible.

At least it seems possible to host archives of such things in their original form (unedited?)

BillW