On 07/13/09 10:51, Darren New wrote:
> That's another of those funky copyright questions: Who is doing the
> "copying" if it's all 100% automated. If I post something to a newsgroup
> and it gets distributed and google news picks it up and then you look at
> it, who made "the copy"?

	Well, if you post on a public newsgroup, is there anything in the law 
that states what rights you have?

	If I were to write a letter to the editor of a paper newspaper, who has 
the rights? I'm assuming the newspaper does, but am not sure. If that's 
the case, I can see where posting to a public forum would grant the 
rights to the forum owners, who may state up front that anything posted 
there is in the public domain.

	Certainly, when Google Groups decided to hide email addresses in their 
archives, a lot of people were upset, saying that Google violated their 
rights by "modifying" their posts. To an extent, I wish they hadn't done 
it either, as it is often easier to search for my and other people's 
posts by searching for their email addresses, rather than their names.

	I had a thought the other day. You can include a header in your posts 
that inform archivers like Google to delete the post after n days. I 
believe Google complies. I don't know if it's binding, though.

	While I strongly value privacy, (possibly more than most), I'm not sure 
I like that header. It may give a false sense of privacy (if it's not 
legally enforceable). But even more pertinently, I feel it can be 
misused (in a manner of speaking). Someone can post some highly 
inflammatory material (politics, religion, etc). And he'll argue back 
and forth. The argument may get heated, but his posts will vanish from 
Google Groups in a month, whereas all of those who responded to him will 
likely be preserved.

	Then, when one of those "others" apply for a job, the potential 
employers will find his posts in that thread, but may not be able to see 
what he replied to. He may look bad due to his comments, because of the 
lack of context.

	So I was thinking: What if I made a script that would detect any 
messages with those headers. And what if any message I reply to (or its 
ancestors in the tree) has such a header (likewise for all descendants 
of my messages). The script would then reply to those messages, simply 
quote the whole thing, and post it back to the server.

	Other than people getting irritated, how much trouble would I get into?

-- 
AAHH!!! I've deleted all my RAM!

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