the thread on copyright has brought up 2 additional issues worth a response: - nancy baym brings up the question of whether or not we OWE it to the author to cite -- in europe the "moral rights" of all artists are much stronger than in the US, where only visual artists have protections for some forms of moral rights. moral rights include the right to be known as the creator of a work, to control what is done to it, etc. what nancy mentions would be considered a moral right of authors in the european context. - and the question of the ephemeral feel of conversations on a listserv or via e-mail was brought up. here we must importantly distinguish between the nature of the experience and legal treatment of the products or processes of that experience. it is precisely the point that e-mail and listservs FEEL like ephemeral conversation, but the law (in the US) has repeatedly made clear that irrespective of that any e-mail message or listserv contribution is treated as publishing. this means that one of the significant shifts in the way in which the law operates in the internet environment is that many laws that previously usually affected only "professional communicators" such as journalists and advertising folks now affect all of us. few of us feared that watercooler gossip would result in a libel suit, for example, but today the e-equivalent of watercooler gossip may well do so. on the unfortunate side, the simple fact that it doesn't FEEL as if we're publishing is irrelevant to the legal treatment of what we produce. sandra braman