E. Allen Smith allegedly said:
From: IN%"ravage@EINSTEIN.ssz.com" "Jim Choate" 15-FEB-1997 07:11:54.43
Perhaps in addition to the X-foo structures we have discussed already we might consider adding,
X-distrib-policy: foo
Where foo might be,
Public Domain All rights reserved, contact author for redistribution Distribution for non-commercial uses permitted Refer to authors header Copyleft etc.
or whatever the policy might be for a given remailer. This would significantly aid folks in their shopping around.
The basic difficulty with this idea is that _senders_ generally don't have much of a choice where the messages go, once you've decided to accept them. In other words, just because you've decided to accept a message doesn't mean it suddenly becomes copyleft/public domain/whatever. Now, if you, say, announced that only subscribers to your particular list, subscribers to any other lists adopting the same idea, and those who'd sign a consent agreement could post through your list, that wouldn't be a problem... although I suspect you wouldn't get many subscribers. -Allen
That wouldn't be the way it work -- Jim operates one of the cp remailers; I operate another. Jim has a standard policy concerning public domain/copyright that is different than mine. So *I* put an X-distrib-policy header in all the cp mail I forward to him. More precisely, all of my incoming mail for "cypherpunks@songbird.com" gets the header. This protocol needs a bit of refinement, and perhaps some hacking at majordomo, but seems fairly straightforward. Jim's policy is actually very reasonable. It has a rational basis, though one might disagree with it, and it is easy to deal with it this way. A more extreme policy -- "The operator of this mailing list claims an exclusive copyright on every piece of mail sent to it; by sending to it you agree to this policy", for example -- would be harder to deal with. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: 5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E 87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F