Re: Picky .sig trend

In article <4eu6a5$iim@inet-nntp-gw-1.us.oracle.com>, Bill Manry - Oracle Corp. <bmanry@ibmgate-aix.us.oracle.com> wrote: >In any case, I'm not sure I understand all the fuss. The newsgroups >are public forums. Not in the sense that material which appears on the Net automatically enters the public domain. Unless the author grants explicit additional reuse privileges, the authors hold the copyright on all written information. Use of such material by Oracle (or any other entity) in a commercial manner without approval of the author is a copyright violation. Certainly, the bad press alone from even a single such suit (calling more customer attention to such procedures) would be far more costly than any theoretical "gain" by its uses as alleged earlier in this thread. A recent example just survived a court challenge: an opponent of Scientology posted information that was part of the public court record on Usenet. It was *copyrighted* material; the fact that it had appeared in a public forum DID NOT INVIOLATE THE COPYRIGHT. The poster was successfully sued. There are loads of class-action lawyers just salivating over cases like these. Such a group as the participants of this forum would certainly constitute a class. Violators have been warned. > Those of you who think for one minute that >personnel from Informix, IBM, Sybase, and other companies aren't >monitoring c.d.oracle and using negative info gained thereby might >be a bit naive. Ignoring for the moment the apparent implication that the concept of business ethics is utterly foreign to certain Oracle employees... ... the idea of "using negative info" is one thing; the deliberate act of quoting copyrighted material beyond Fair Use guidelines in a commercial arena is something quite different. If the only way certain companies will come to appreciate that fact is by legal action, that's unfortunate. >Bill Manry - Mainframe and Integration Technologies - Oracle Corporation >Standard disclaimer applies. -- (c) 1996 Alan Denney aland@informix.com Disclaimer: These opinions are mine alone. If I am caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of my actions. "It is unimaginable that the Chinese would kill such a goose (as Hong Kong's independent commerce). Yet we wouldn't need the metaphor of golden eggs and geese if history wasn't full of dead geese." -- Christopher Patten, Governor of Hong Kong