Raul Miller wrote:
You either have something interesting to say, or YOU are off-topic.
http://lists.debian.org/misc.html says about debian-legal "Copyright, licensing and patent issues". It doesn't explicitly say "relevant to Debian activities." Do we need to change this?
My "something interesting" was referred to the topic of this list/thread. Raul Miller wrote:
Most of Jeff Prescot's letter was off-topic for this mailing list.
So, I was trying to have a conversation on the DMCA and WCT, which is respectively US copyright law and the international copyright treaty. Now, explain me, why is my letter "off topic"? The WCT is not merely concerned with protection against hakers, and the DMCA ought to enforce the WCT and the Berne convention in full. Steve Greenland wrote:
I think you will find that "the Debian community" is actually a very strong supporter of copyright; that's why we have the DFSG, and are extremely careful about evaluating the licenses of what we distribute. There's lots of bitching about restrictive licenses, but that's because we *do* respect copyright, if we didn't we'd distribute the stuff regardless of license. What we (in the US, anyway) object to is the paid enactment of laws designed to protect the financial interests of large corporations, which is what the DMCA is all about.
OK, lets change topic then. Let's focus on mail headers. In his mail, Marcelo Magallon wrote:
Mail-Copies-To: header is "never", not "nobody"
It should be emphasized that this is something *newsreaders* use. What the author says using this header is that he doesn't want email copies of Usenet posts, which is similar but not the same as mailing lists.
So, I verified myself and, do you know what, I have discovered that each mail that we post to debian-legal, for example, is also posted by Debian to the Usenet News! We did not post to the News, did we? It is Debian that posted it! This accounts for a violation of the DMCA, also because not every outhor is posting from the USA, and the punishment for it is a 1M dollars fine, and the seclusion for 5 years. In other words, each one of us, who has posted to this list, by law, should now reveive a compensation of 1M dollars, and the managers of Debian lists ought to go to jail. We are not "large corporations" nor we have "finantial interests" when posting here, but still the DMCA has its say. Whether this is also good or bad, it is not up to me to say, but is certainly something that this list should discuss. -- Jeff _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
