Neeum Zawan wrote:
>     Yes, but would it be allowed for the people who run the POV-Ray 
> newsgroups to, say, state that if someone posts on it, then the authors 
> cede ownership to the owners of the newsgroup?

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that anything the original author 
sends to a particular place belongs to the owner of that place.  That's what 
newspapers do with letters to the editor (at least those supposedly going 
into the "letters to the editor" column).

That's not what google does, tho.

>> That's what I'm saying. I have no idea. I would think if google can take
>> a post I posted to a local server here and publish it off their machines
>> long after every copy *I* made was deleted, it would be hard to argue
>> you were doing anything google wasn't.
> 
>     Yes, but Google respects the headers that state that a posting 
> should be deleted.

I understood what you're saying. I'm saying the law doesn't say anything 
about me having to put headers on my files to have my copyright respected.

> You post on a newsgroup with the header suggesting that your message 
> should not be archived beyond 30 days.
> 
> I notice this, and immediately reply to it, quoting your whole message, 
> to ensure that your message *will* stay on Google's public archives 
> indefinitely.

Yes, I understood that. I was talking about google (say) taking posts off 
the pov-ray servers and serving them to the entire world, including those 
who don't connect to the pov-ray server.

In your case, I think there would be a big argument over the implied license 
given to google and to google's other users. Certainly if google has a right 
to serve the messages to you, you have a right to make a copy for your own 
use. It's messy, but I don't think the inclusion of headers is going to 
change much.

You can already try the experiment. Post something on google's servers, and 
in the body say "I hereby license this for only 10 days for google's 
servers, after which license to reproduce this is revoked." Good luck 
getting google to follow that, altho legally it's likely the same as the 
headers.  The only difference would be if you actively agreed to google's 
terms and they described how you're giving them a perpetual license. But 
since google scrapes stuff from all over, you don't have to agree with 
google's terms to get google copying your copyrighted work.

There's nothing in the copyright laws requiring a robots.txt file in order 
to maintain your copyrights, is what I'm saying. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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