At 02:29 PM 5/15/96 -0700, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:

At 10:58 AM 5/15/96 -0700, Hal wrote:

...

The problem that I think the Scientology postings raise is that the remailers cannot really be used to post copyrighted material.

The major battle the net has faced is with the church of scientology. In this battle the net is clearly in the right, and the church clearly in the wrong, regardless of what copyright law says.

The copyright issue is probably irrelevant to the Scientology dispute, anyway. The material on which the copyright is claimed almost certainly wasn't marked, appropriately, as it would have had to be for the copyright to be valid. While current law no longer requires the "circle-C" notation long used for this purpose, the material involved is far more than old enough to have been subject to this requirement, and once a copyright is lost (or not claimed) I believe it couldn't be regained. The threat to remailers is one of the many reasons the Leahy bill sucked, and that would have made it worse by imposing criminal sanctions on this kind of thing. Ironically, with the way remailers are used, it would actually have been possible for some copyright holder to fabricate a violation of copyright law by posting his own material through remailers, and then sue the final remailer, or have its owner prosecuted. I'm glad the people around here finally saw the light. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com