Legality of Posting Received E-Mail to Netnews?
John Chambers
jc at minya.UUCP
Mon Jun 24 02:40:36 AEST 1991
In article <2247 at riscy.enet.dec.com>, frank at croton.nyo.dec.com (Frank Wortner) writes:
>
> Be very careful when you make statements about copyright, patent, or
> other intellectual property law. It's too easy to get into BIG
> TROUBLE. If you have any doubts or questions about copyright or
> other legal issues, consult a lawyer. You could save yourself
> tremendous amounts of legal grief.
>
> If anyone cares to continue this topic, I've directed followups to
> misc.legal. They certainly don't belong in comp.unix.ultrix.
Well, now, I don't think I agree with this. Case in point: I've been
involved is some discussions recently that derive from my attempts to
make some sense out of our email mess. The basic problem here isn't
that we need a good email package. The problem is that we have a lot
of them, each one by itself quite usable, but incompatible with its
neighbors. When you try to get cooperation from the supporters of
each, you invariably get a lot of suggestions that if you had any
brains at all, you would just use package ______ and those other
turkeys should just slink off into the bushes and quietly die, and you
are an idiot for not seeing this.
This is, of course, just a lot of arrogant insults, and when I point
this out, I invariably get a lot of "What the hell are you talking
about, turkey?" responses. So I collect some of the most insulting of
the lot and mail or post them, together with the observation that this
is not helping to solve the problems.
It seems to me that this is quite germane to the problem at hand. Note
that the problem isn't technical. The problem is the arrogant,
insulting and uncooperative nature of many of the people that you have
to deal with to get a job done. It really helps to illustrate the
problem if you can publish quotes. If this is illegal, then the people
that are the cause of the problems can continue to get away with their
actions, and we can't solve the problems.
How many times have we seen "RTFM" when it is obvious that the writer
had tried TFM and not understood it?
--
All opinions Copyright (c) 1991 by John Chambers. Inquire for licensing at:
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