On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 01:37:05AM -0500, David Phillips wrote: > This page has some good information about copyright: > > http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html A seemingly pertinent quote from that page: While copyright law makes it technically illegal to reproduce almost any new creative work (other than under fair use) without permission, if the work is unregistered and has no real commercial value, it gets very little protection. The author in this case can sue for an injunction against the publication, actual damages from a violation, and possibly court costs. Actual damages means actual money potentially lost by the author due to publication, plus any money gained by the defendant. But if a work has no commercial value, such as a typical E-mail message or conversational USENET posting, the actual damages will be zero. Only the most vindictive (and rich) author would sue when no damages are possible, and the courts don't look kindly on vindictive plaintiffs, unless the defendants are even more vindictive. By my reading, this says reproducing a typical email message may infringe the author's copyright, but the author's loss of publication revenue is probably zero so there's not much point in filing a lawsuit on the basis of copyright infringement. -- Joel Schneider IYXQA - www.yanxinqigong.net joel at joelschneider.net ISEE - www.i-see.org _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list