At 12:01 Uhr -0400 27.5.2001, air-l-request@aoir.org wrote:

Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 12:13:34 +0200 To: <air-l@aoir.org> From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman@bi.no> Subject: [Air-l] More on copyright Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org

Dear Colleagues,

Appreciated additional responses and thoughts on copyright.

One post deserves comment: someone wrote a note to the effect that much of this discussion involved American issues. Not so. There are world-wide copyright laws and mutual recognition of national laws provided under the Berne Convention.

Dear Ken, dear list, thanks for the many URLs of Websites devoted to copyright issues. Sure, there are international conventions covering the handling of conflicts in a general way. However, the application of existing copyright laws and practices in various countries (and states) to cases involving the Internet has not been standardized yet - which is precisely the reason for this discussion. When discussiong "the law" please keep in mind that there are very different law systems in the world, just think of the case system (as in the UK and the US) and the code system (as in France). Therefore, going into too much details of legalese doesn't make sense. In my opinion, we - the Internet community - should rather develop and express an Internet-experience-based catalogue of advice on legal issues, and point out those cases where "Offliners" go terribly wrong. To clarify and empirically justify my original post: The discussion in this list in fact mostly involved American issues. The logic of thinking as well as the examples to a large extent only make sense within the American legal system and are hard to understand from the outside. Let me pick a list of terms and sentences from one of your posts, Ken, that explicitly or implicitly show what I mean: At 12:01 Uhr -0400 25.5.2001, air-l-request@aoir.org wrote:

Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 19:17:12 +0200 To: <air-l@aoir.org> From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman@bi.no> Subject: [Air-l] Copyright and fair use -- further notes Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org

- The Wind Done Gone - the Sonny Bono act. - 'fair use' - Copyright is determined by legislative act and interpreted by the courts. - to protect against the possibility of libel - the fact that clear demonstration of careful procedures with intent to avoid defamation is itself protection against libel. - Bullwinkle the Moose - lawyer for Wilhelm Reich with less fortunate results - until a judge and jury say you have." - elected to Congress - appointed to the federal bench, he or she can change the law - Martin Luther King - Peter Zenger did with libel law. - many publishers are greedy. This does not limit their rights under the law. The Internet is a world-wide network. Applying local standards too tightly to Internet issues is a danger for the Internet itself, as it will lead to fragmentation or censorship in the end. Therefore, Jeremy, if you feel that your university's policy or your county's law imply a problem with some of the postings in this list - then please let me know, and I'll look into setting up a sub-list or Website on a server in a different part of the world to host these postings ;-) Best wishes, --u