Re: significant "legal" events?

Crow's Friend Timmy (chuq@apple.com)
Mon, 25 Jan 93 08:56:35 -0800

>I'm looking for some info anyone might have to share on the subject of
>events in the Usenet's history regarding legal problems, such as
>liability or copyright.

> the posting of "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" to rec.arts.sf
> (or somesuch) in 1986 or 1987.
>Can anyone give me some details on these or other events, which have
>caused some to question the legal sustainability of the Usenet?

I can on this one, since I was in the middle of it.

A kid (fairly literally) from back east somewhere (U of Pitt? I don't
remember offhand) ran into this neat story by Larry Niven. He wanted to
share it with his friends, so he typed it in and posted it to
rec.arts.comics.

In my kind, quiet, non-judgemental way that makes me a favorite with all the
kids of the world, I jumped down his throat and raised a bunch of hell about
it. After explaining the concept of copyright to him, he was nice and
contrite and made public apologies to everyone and the world, and wrote a
formal apology to Niven as well. We cancelled the messages and he did some
mea culpas to his admin, who if I remember rightly, gave him a stern lecture
and let him off with a warning (which is what I'd privately suggested. The
kid went through enough hell just having to deal with me, and it was an
honest mistake of naivete, not a blatant ripoff.)

Parallel to that, I'd contacted Larry and explained the situation, offered
my help in whatever resolution he wanted and later passed along the final
status and apology. Larry was quite nice about it, and agreed that minimal
harm was done out of enthusiasm and didn't feel that any action beyond what
we did was necessary. End of case.

A similar thing happened later when OtherRealms' copyright was violated when
some well-meaning soul infringed on a Jack Chalker article by reposting it
to SF-Lovers without permission. I very nicely, quietly and
non-judgementally stomped on his windpipe, also, and then got Jack to
formally agree that appropriate steps had been taken to protect his
copyright. (The latter, in both cases, being formal releases of liability,
which I still have in my files somewhere, not that I expect to need them).

All in all, I've been involved in maybe half a dozen copyright violation
situations where either my copyright (for OtherRealms) has been violated on
the net, one of my authors copyrights in OtherRealms has been violated, or a
SFWA member (or other SF author) has been infringed. I believe that only
once did my "Godzilla is attacking the city" schtick not work, and I had to
go to the site admin and point out the legal liabilities involved to both
the user and the site. In that case, things happened REAL quick, the
articles disappeared, and not so coincidentally so did the user. Normally,
if the user is contrite (most of the time, it's naivete or simply lack of
thought. That last time, it was a conscious infringement of Doug Adams with
a distinct lack of remorse by someone who grabbed a pirated copy of some
stuff off of an ftp site and decided to pass it along. That one got traced
up the chain a bit through a couple of ftp sites until the source
disappeared somewhere in Europe, but the original source for the text was
the Voyager electronic edition of Adams' books. Welcome to the wonderful age
of computer-based book publishing. Adams and the publisher were notified,
FWIW).

I'm aware of a number of violations that I chose to not get involved in as
well, from the rather rampant script passing in the monty python (and other)
TV group to copies of the Rocky Horror scripts, to the online copies of
Paramounts/Pockets Deep Space 9 writing bibles, to, well, you get the
picture. I could probably spend most of my life tracking down copyright
violations on-line, even ignoring the naughty pictures, but I've generally
limited myself to issues I'm either involved in in some way, people I know
personally or people attached to SFWA, since I'm involved in that
organization. There was a recent case where someone posted the entire script
for RETURN OF THE JEDI where some people asked me to step in as well, but
since I know Lucasfilm is on the net, I figured they could take care of
their own...

As to legal sustainability, one of these days an author someone who isn't
patient or tolerant of this kind of stuff is going to be infringed and want
to make an example of someone. So far, in all the cases I've been in, we've
been able to show intent to minimize the damage and fix the situation, which
has been good enough. Some day, it probably won't be.

At that point, I hope I'm far away from the problem, because it's hard to
tell exactly what will happen. That's one reason why Playboy's active search
for electronic copyright violations scares me so much: an active plaintiff
with deep pockets and very good lawyers searching for BBSes and the like to
sue and not unwilling to spend lots of money to set legal precedents to make
its point. (FWIW, apple has nuked the naughty bits just to try to avoid the
potential fallout of this. If Playboy sends our lawyers a nasty letter, I
want to be able to simply say "we don't, we haven't, we won't, sue someone
else").

Hope this helps.

This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16