Xref: utzoo rec.humor.d:1207 news.misc:2124
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!sun!plaid!chuq
From: chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: rec.humor.d,news.misc
Subject: Re: Yes, I can sell a jokebook via USENET.
Message-ID: <79090@sun.uucp>
Date: 28 Nov 88 04:15:28 GMT
References: <2391@looking.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality
Lines: 153

>Q:	Can you do commercial activity on USENET?
>
>A:	There is a popular myth that commercial activity is not allowed or
>	encouraged on USENET.  This is false.  It goes on all the time, and
>	the only criterion that really applies is whether net readers get
>	something of value from it.

Excuse me for coming into a conversation late, but nobody bothered to tell
me that Brad had brought me into the discussion before now. [It's generally
a good idea to make sure that if you're bitching about someone on the net
publicly, they know about it -- I gave up reading news.* months ago, and if
it weren't for a net-friend, I'd STILL not know about this...]

Anyway, I think Brad's wrong here. The only criterion is whether or not the
net readers let you get away with it. Value has nothing to do with it. If
you do something wrong but benign, or stupid but meaningless, or if they
simply don't care, nobody will call you on it.

On the other hand -- on the Internet, commercial activity is explicitly
against the rules and CAN get you in trouble. Add that to the large number
of Internet-based NNTP links and Brad's all-too-true statement above about
it happening all the time, and ask yourself if USENET is violating Internet
rules....

>	Another moderator, Chuq Von Rospach, has an newsgroup where every
>	issue advertises that the fanzine is available in print form, for
>	a fee.

True. This happens to be the first time someone's mentioned the possible
conflicts to me, and thinking about it, it's probably a bad idea --
especially with the Internet connections for OtherRealms. I probably should
*not* be doing it, so starting next issue, I won't. Something bland and
non-commercial like:

	Subscriptions to the printed version of OtherRealms are available.
	Contact me for details

will be used instead. 

>He even advertised T-shirts in the last issue.

I certainly did. And if the subscriptions are marginal, the T-shirt sale was
blatantly wrong. 

Frankly, until Brad brought it up here, I never even thought of the
implications of it. The cost of the T-shirts is about $.50 less than my real
cost, but that's a non-issue. I shouldn't have done it. I'll excise the
advertisement from my archive-server and make sure it doesn't happen in a
future issue. Not a good thing to do, and I'm sorry it slipped past.

I don't believe either of these situations, by the way, gives Brad any
precedent for doing his book. The fact that I got away with something that
was wrong (or potentially wrong, depending on which case you look at)
doesn't mean what he's doing is right. It just means nobody complained about
the problem until now, and I didn't catch it. 

Oh, well. I'll be more careful in the future. 

>Q:	What if you sell a lot? (thousands)

If you take the track record of OtherRealms, not bloody likely. Besides, if
you ask me, whether something makes money (like Brad's book) or loses money
(like OtherRealms or my T-shirt) is a non-issue. Money is money, and whether
there's too much of it or too little of it is immaterial.

----

Those directly related comments aside, let me put in a few cents worth of my
thoughts on this whole shebang.

First, *legally* Brad can do whatever he wants with those jokes. They were
posted, in the public domain, to an open forum. If he wants to collect them
and publish them, he's welcome to. Public domain means just that -- free and
clear to any comer. Unless he uses a joke that was posted with a copyright
notice without the permission of the copyright holder, there's no legal
restriction on what he's doing.

On the other hand, if someone took a copyrighted joke and posted it to the
net (itself being a copyright violation) doesn't explicitly make the joke a
public domain piece. Unless Brad verifies that the material really, truly is
public domain, he's asking for someone to come and file copyright violations
against him. The fact that he got it from a source that he felt was public
domain isn't necessarily a reasonable defense and definitely wouldn't pay
his legal fees -- and even if he could pin the violation back on the
original poster in a legally provable way, he could still find himself
liably for not doing the research and carrying the violation forward.
Copyright is such FUN stuff.....

If you ask me, any 'precedent' set by OtherRealms about this sort of stuff
isn't applicable to Brad's book anyway. Why? Because:

 o All material in OtherRealms is original to OtherRealms (with very few
   exceptions for which I have explicit permission from the owner). It is
   published in a copyrighted, printed form, and a version of that is made
   available on the net.

   On the other hand, Brad's book:

 o takes openly posted, public domain material on the net, re-packages it
   into a commercial form, and re-sells it. 

I am taking material and, with the explicit permission of the owner, making
it available on the net. Brad is taking material from the net, packaging it
and selling it. 

There is, I submit, no similarity between what Brad is doing and what I do.
Besides, even if the precedents WERE applicable, the fact that I got away
with something that was wrong (which I admit, and which I will change in the
future) doesn't give Brad permission to do the same. Two wrongs, and all that.

This whole discussion comes down to one of ethics. Legally, Brad can do what
he's doing. The question, though, is ethical: SHOULD he do it? Is it 'right'
to take material from the net and package it for sale? This ethical problem
doesn't come up with OtherRealms, because my material never originated on
the net, and is made available on the net only as a service to the readers.

Even though it's legally public domain, is it proper for Brad to do it?

THAT's a question I'm not gonna touch. You folks can have lots of fun
arguing ethics -- I've got a magazine to put out. I don't have patience for
mindless flame-wars anymore.

(A few side-comments before I go. If you *don't* want folks to use your
stuff, copyright the articles. And if you don't think Brad should do what
he's doing, don't buy the book -- if he loses his shirt over this, he's VERY
unlikely to do it again. Finally, if you don't support his actions, don't
read his group of post to it. If the submissions stop, that's a statement
in itself)

If you ask me, this is a perfect reason why kill files were created. If you
don't like what Brad's doing, do what I did after Brad posted that shitty
Tiptree 'joke' last April and refused to acknowledge his actions -- put Brad in your kill file
and make him go away. Creative use of kill files and the 'u' command
make USENET a much quieter and more intelligent place to play. The REALITY
is you'll never make USENET act like you want it to, but with kill files you
can snip off the parts that most offend your senses without trying to force
YOUR view of reality on the rest of us. 

What Brad is doing may well be stupid (or it may not be -- I'm NOT getting
in that discussion, thank you, although I will drop broad hints) but there's
an amazing amount of equally (or more) stupid shit going on as well. I've
found it much easier on my ulcer to stop trying to clean out the Augean
stables of the net. Let folks have their stupidity if they want it -- but
don't feel you need to cooperate. If enough people ignore it, it will
whither on the vine and go away. And if enough people DO want it enough to
make it survive or prosper, then it's likely your view of 'ethical' is
different from the majority of the net....


Chuq Von Rospach	Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms		chuq@sun.COM

I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him. For Brutus is an honorable
man. So are they all, all honorable men.