Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 04:16:35 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: davids@webmaster.com (David Schwartz) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass), mwm@mired.org (Mike Meyer), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Stallman stalls again Message-ID: <200103130416.VAA03741@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <NCBBLIEPOCNJOAEKBEAKMECANMAA.davids@webmaster.com> from "David Schwartz" at Mar 12, 2001 06:00:55 PM
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> > Authors do not have moral rights; they have legal rights, > > granted to them under law, such law in the United States > > being an instrumentality of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 > > of the U.S. Constitution: > > So if I write a story , I don't have the moral right to decide whether to > share it with others or not? Since I do in fact have that right, I'm curious > if you could cite the law that gives it to me. All works of authorship are automatically copyright by the author, whether they affix a copyright statement, or not. This has been the case since your country signed the Berne Convention. So you have the _legal_ right to not publish the story, and to not give away publication rights. For example, since you are posting this email to a public mailing list which does not have membership restrictions to qualify its members as a "select group", you have ceded the first North American publishing rights to your posting, as well as other right in other countries where this list is distributed. Publication of something to a "select group" falls into the category of "trade secret", BTW, so if this _were_ a closed list, so long as you exercised due dilligence in choosing the group and informing them to to repeat your message, you have certain legal rights remaining as regards publication. So, for example, you could send a private email to someone, and recover damages based on treble your losses for the disclosure of your message, so long as you warned the recipient against disclosure; that assumes that you had any real losses. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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