> Peter wrote an excellent essay on the ethical and

> moral issues involved with archiving news posts. I snipped it.

>

> Peter, that was a very good read, and very thoughtful. I agreed with

almost > all of what you wrote.

>

> There are a couple of fine points though, that I wanted to mention.

>

> You CAN quote a book without the author’s permission, but it has to be a

> small quote and only for specific purposes. You can’t just take big hunks

> of text and re-publish them, of course.

>

> Also, newsgroup postings are not “public domain”, although I don’t recall

> that you specifically said this in your post. They are certainly publicly

> readable, but that doesn’t mean they escape being covered by the Berne

> Convention (of which Australia is a member). Written works are copyrighted

> the moment they are fixed in tangible form, and a news posting is

certainly > tangible. In Australia, there are no means of “registering” copyright such

> as they have in the United States, so anything written in Australia by an

> Australian is, under Australian and international law, copyrighted

> automatically.

>

> The only exception to this is if the author specifically and knowingly

> releases all rights to the work or it has been more than (I think) seventy

> years since publication (or something to that effect; I’d have to look it

> up and I’m too lazy to do it right now).

>

> As for Google, it’s entirely possible to get Google NOT to archive your

> post when you make it. There’s a header you can put in: X-No-Archive and

if > Google encounters that header, it won’t archive the post. Some news

> software (mine included) has an automatic option that you can tick if you

> want that header added to your post.

>

> Therefore, it could be said that if the author of the post has included

> that header, the post should NOT be archived anywhere, without the

author’s > permission prior to archiving it.

>

> Other than that, it is, as you note, an ethical and moral grey area. I’ve

> always been one to err on the side of “if in doubt, leave it out” and I

> don’t republish others’ stuff unless I have license to do so. I don’t want

> people circulating my material (written and otherwise) without my consent

> or out of context or whatever, so I just follow the “do unto others

thing”. > 🙂

>

> And now I shall disclose that Rowland and I have had more or less this

> discussion before, about “author unknown” and also about things circulated

> on the net. We finally came to a point where we agreed to disagree on the

> subject, because neither of us was going to change the other’s viewpoint.

>

> bonni