Alberto Gaitan on 16 Feb 2001 18:18:22 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Usenet archives sold? |
-:===== On 15 Feb 2001, Tiffany Lee Brown wrote: =====:- > i like the idea of applying a public license. in the case of > Google/Deja/net news, it's too late. you can't retroactively apply > any kind of license, not unless you can find each and every person > who's every posted to Usenet and get their permission. I think that the Bern accord (1984?) protects anyone's writing/image by default, without the author having to claim it or put the copyright symbol on it. Usenet complicates that matter because almost anyone can post as anyone else (natural or engineered). Still, if you can prove that you wrote it (and good luck with that, on Usenet), you can seek damages if someone steals it. Are we saying that just because our writings, mostly proffered without much hope for remuneration (of the magic green ticket variety), have been archived, and that that archive has been sold, that we're being stolen from? Is the alternative a pay-as-you-play searchable archive with Byzantine rights-management systems overlaying it? 'cause lawmakers are already forging public license- like solutions, one of them mentioned in my previous post: basically archive all you want, but keep the content free that was once free. As I mentioned before, in the case of Google/Deja it'll probably boil down to giving them database copyright, *not* content copyright. That, combined with their search engine patent(s) make them a viable, self-sustaining business. This is *kinda* like what many (me included) would like to see happen with the Human Genome (another icky story, but here also we have archivers, at work on a public resource and threatening to patent whatever they find). The corporations, ugly or beautiful, that put up their capital to archive intellectual property that is otherwise being given away by its "owners," need to be able to make a few bucks too. The only way they can do that is if they can sell tools/services to analyze it, and to be able to sell the archive to anyone as a database, not as piecemeal quotations from it. Posting on Usenet was never about making a few bucks from publishing. It was about cred, and, at its most idealistic, about expecting attribution in perpetuity, and expecting faithful quotation for as long as a thread was alive. These quotations were just as often factually wrong as they were correct. Archivers like Google allow us to accomplish sophisticated searches to cull out the bullshit from the goodshit. They deserve something for their trouble. What? Freely searchable online archives are as necessary to writers as libraries. In the absence of a publicily funded archive (which we all wish, in retrospect, 'someone' had instituted) we've been stuck depending on deja for our freely searchable Usenet posts. [And that has only included text posts. Think of all those binaries that are forever gone.] Should these entities make no money from their efforts? And, again, I'm not talking about making money from piecemeal quotations a la LEXIS-NEXIS but rather for the care, feeding and landscaping of the archive. Alberto _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold