Please remove all posts from the HORSEPOWERED.COM web forum for this user name. This post has been made to rec.autos.makers.ford.mustang and not HORSEPOWERED.COM, nor do I wish to participate in HORSEPOWERED.COM's web based forum.
Thank you for your cooperation, Michael Johnson
Legal disclaimer: I do not give you permission to use this post or any others of mine on any other web site. This posting is meant solely for the RAMFM, and it's associated news group readers. By posting this to your privately run web site, you then give me, as the author, permission to have your web site shut down for theft of content.
The following is a copy of an email I just sent to snipped-for-privacy@horsepowered.com snipped-for-privacy@comcast.net and the customer service department of
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Request to remove named postings to horsepowered.com
This a request to have any postings made by me, phyrestang aka snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com, to the newsgroup rec.autos.makers.ford.mustang removed from your website
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immediately. My permission was neither requested nor granted for my posts to be used on a private website and forum. Especially considering the way they are presented, which would lead people to believe that my posts were made directly to horsepowered.com instead of RAMFM.
I think that it is sad that over 80% of the individual posts made to your forums at this time (4329 out of 5170 total posts) are copied from rec.autos.makers.ford.mustang without the permission of its posters. Any future postings by me to RAMFM will be accompanied by a disclaimer stating that I do not wish my postings to be used on any private website. Should said disclaimer not be followed, I will be forced to consider legal action.
Just how is somebody using (if it's unaltered) post from a public NG on a website illegal or unfair? There are post that I placed 10 years ago from different NG's on google; if the guy is not making a profit (and even if he is), anything on a NG is pretty well public domain.
Now if stuff is being altered, I can understand some indignation...
Founder and publisher of ClariNet Communications Corp., the world's first ever ".com" company
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3) "If it's posted to Usenet it's in the public domain."
False. Nothing modern is in the public domain anymore unless the owner explicitly puts it in the public domain(*). Explicitly, as in you have a note from the author/owner saying, "I grant this to the public domain." Those exact words or words very much like them.
Some argue that posting to Usenet implicitly grants permission to everybody to copy the posting within fairly wide bounds, and others feel that Usenet is an automatic store and forward network where all the thousands of copies made are done at the command (rather than the consent) of the poster. This is a matter of some debate, but even if the former is true (and in this writer's opinion we should all pray it isn't true) it simply would suggest posters are implicitly granting permissions "for the sort of copying one might expect when one posts to Usenet" and in no case is this a placement of material into the public domain. It is important to remember that when it comes to the law, computers never make copies, only human beings make copies. Computers are given commands, not permission. Only people can be given permission. Furthermore it is very difficult for an implicit licence to supersede an explicitly stated licence that the copier was aware of.
Note that all this assumes the poster had the right to post the item in the first place. If the poster didn't, then all the copies are pirated, and no implied licence or theoretical reduction of the copyright can take place.
(*) Copyrights can expire after a long time, putting something into the public domain, and there are some fine points on this issue regarding older copyright law versions. However, none of this applies to an original article posted to USENET.
Note that granting something to the public domain is a complete abandonment of all rights. You can't make something "PD for non-commercial use." If your work is PD, other people can even modify one byte and put their name on it.
-------- Permission is granted to freely print, unmodified, up to 100 copies of the most up to date version of this document from
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or to copy it in off-the- netelectronic form.
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(disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Brad Templeton nor do I claim anything written here to be the indisputable fact. It is placed here for the sake counter-point. I advocate legal advice is best gained from a lawyer and not from a poster on Usenet.)
"...In a fit of despair one night in Mar. 1994 Mihaly, a senior at Cornell University, posted to alt.drugs stating he was going to kill himself and asking for advice. A reader of the newsgroup noticed the post, and alerted the Cornell authorities who sent the Cornell police to bring Mihaly to a local hospital. Cornell's actions were all legal under New York State law.
This brings up another issue unique to Usenet -- privacy. Before Usenet, it would be difficult to broadcast such a message to so many people. Usenet changes that, and brings up the question of what kind of forum Usenet is. Is it a public forum, equivalent to running down the street shouting? If so, then what Mihaly did was equivalent to shouting out to everyone that he was going to kill himself. Certainly, Cornell would have intervened in that case. Or is the Usenet more private, a place where you expect what you say won't be repeated? If so, then, Mihaly would have been right to expect Cornell not to find out about the post.
As the Mihaly case shows, it is too easy to forget when posting to Usenet that the legal system views such actions as shouting to the world."
Joe Calypso Green '93 5.0 LX AOD hatch with a few goodies Black '03 Dakota 5.9 R/T CC
May be so... but this in no way implies you relinquish copyright ownership of your "material"... else tv broadcasting and radio broadcasting and all those that use those media, are in serious trouble. :)
(sadly enough... I once had someone that argued with me in the newsgroups, that once music is released from a musician as air waves the composer/copyright holder loses copyright protection. How absurd. It's searchable on Google. I argue that a copyright dispute of 4 minutes of recorded silence was once upheld (true). So even your failure to say something may be considered an infringement!! (not true, hahaha..))
snipped-for-privacy@aol.commune (Nospam9212) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m10.aol.com:
Nonsense. The fact that a USENET post (such as this one, for example) exists doesn't mean I have copyright ownership of it. Unless TV and radio broadcasts have a legal disclaimer (i.e., NFL games) stating as such, program content is indeed able to be copied. If this were not the case, we'd all be in jail for using VCRs and Tivos.
Indeed. When an artist copyrights his/her material, it's theirs regardless of where/how/to whom it's released. But again, USENET posts simply don't have copyright protection.
Joe Calypso Green '93 5.0 LX AOD hatch with a few goodies Black '03 Dakota 5.9 R/T CC
Feel free to contact me in regards to "intellectual property" and the rights herein associated with them. It was truly an eye opening, and worthwhile trip to the legal gallery yesterday afternoon.
"Michael Johnson, PE" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com:
Perhaps because I don't want to join his site. I read NG's for all my interests and I like to have them all in one place. On a newserver.
Besides, you guys are becoming infamous throughout various NG's. Flame wars always excite interest and the way things are going, you'll have every troll on Usenet coming to make your lives a misery. It'll be entirely your own fault.
Ever heard the legend of Derek Smart? Longest running flame war on Usenet dude, back when it was just AOL and Compuserv. It's still going on today. Lawsuits are always threatened there too, and things are far more libelous and nasty than they've ever been here. In all these years, how many lawsuits have been brought?
Not one.
Your Fuhrer BillyBob is full of shit and he knows it.
If you guys wanna destroy your own newsgroup and make fools of yourselves before the whole world, well go ahead. But don't complain when the trolls scent blood and come for some sport.
MTT ______
The smaller the mind the greater the conceit. Aesop (~550 BC)
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