RC: RE: Phil Gardner's letter in April EN Mailbag

["Linda B. Merims" <lbm@ici.net>]

Mike Sofen wrote:
> 
> Joe, I agree with all of your opinions re: fees, and am glad you expressed
> them so clearly.  One small point on copyrights, however - even though
> technically it may appear you can copyright your email, in reality all
> emails and newsgroup chat are automatically in the public domain and thus
> unavailable to copyright.
> 
> Since emails can be easily impersonated (it is a trivial thing to send you
> email as if I were Bill Clinton and originating from the White House), there
> is no real way to prove ownership/authorship.  I expect to see more of this
> type of incident in the future.
> 
> Mike

Completely false.

That one cannot necessarily authenticate the actual source of an e-mail
(at least not without extreme difficulty) says nothing whatsoever about
whether or not its content is copyrighted.  Absent any other agreements
(for example, some "free" list services like onelist.com assert a copyright
in their user agreement on all traffic that passes through their servers)
if you wrote it, you own it.

If Phil Gardner has any legal leg to stand on, it comes under the
heading of "fair use," *not* that Joe's statements were in the public
domain.  One of fair use's aspects is that it is reasonable to quote
small excerpts from copyrighted material for illustrative purposes.
Gardner probably had the right to do what he did, although one could
object to it as kind of dirty pool, and one could criticize the
editors at _Endurance News_ for letting Gardner dictate the content
and venue for the debate, without notifying Joe that they were going
to do this.  They at least owe Joe the editorial space for a rebuttal.

Linda B. Merims
Professional Writer
lbm@ici.net
Massachusetts, USA


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