Re: Musing on Monastery Content

I think the answer and solution are easy. "Ownership" isn't hard to determine. Almost any country in the world, including the United States, have signed the Berne convention. Which means that unless an author clearly revokes or changes his rights, anything someone creates (including writes) has his/her copyright.

But copyright also gives a solution for the percieved dilemma. If you are afraid your reply isn't going to make sense on its own, then quote the parts you are replying to. Copyright laws do give you the right to quote if that's necessary to write your article.

This isn't a new problem. Usenet has been around since, oh, 20+ years, and email even longer. Parent articles might not be available to the reader, either because they are superseeded, expired, or because they never made it to the reader. It's also inconvenient to have to swap to one or more parent articles. So people quote what they are responding to, and each article makes sense in its own right. They are self-contained.

Comment on Re: Musing on Monastery Content

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Re^2: Musing on Monastery Content by Anonymous Monk on Oct 19, 2004 at 01:07 UTC
I don’t think there is any doubt that the author of a node owns the copyright, but as far as I know, copyright does not grant the right to retract published works.	[reply]
Re^3: Musing on Monastery Content by Anonymous Monk on Oct 21, 2004 at 11:41 UTC
Indeed. As such, the author probably can't enforce perlmonks to remove his postings from their machines. However, since perlmonks doesn't have the copyright, it doesn't have the right to make those postings available to other people (that is, making it accessable on a webpage).	[reply]
Re^4: Musing on Monastery Content by Anonymous Monk on Oct 21, 2004 at 15:51 UTC
I'm not so sure about that. I would think that most people would be very surprised if Perlmonks didn't present their work to other users, which means they are expecting Perlmonks to distribute their published works, and have implicitly granted them the right to do so when they create their node. The Author's copyright gives them the ability to grant Perlmonks permission to distribute their work, but without a written contract in place they are going to need to convince a court that their permission to Perlmonks can be revoked. (i.e. I think it is obvious that an Author is implicitly granting publishing rights to Perlmonks, and without an explicit contract it is the Author’s burden if he wants to change that.)	[reply]