Re: "Farming" Addresses from Midrange-L

Message text written by INTERNET:MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
>I just visited the mailing.html page at rpgalive. WHAT a dis' to David.
Any
lawyers out there that want donate their services ?
<

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm currently enrolled in an online class on
copyright law.  I'm going to be doing some research on this issue after
work for David and don't plan to post all of my comments here but I do have
the following to say:

1) They reproduced the Midrange Guidelines on their site.  If they did this
without David's consent, it's a violation of copyright law.  Writings do
NOT need to contain a copyright notice; they are automatically protected as
soon as they are written.  

2) They reproduced one of his periodic posts to the comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc
newsgroup which notify readers of the presence of this list in it's
entirety.  Again, if done without his permission, this is a violation of
copyright law.

3) They remark that posting the stuff in a 'public forum' makes the
information public.  This is false.  It's protected and does NOT fall into
the public domain.  Publically *accessable* is not the same thing as public
domain.

4) They state that the Midrange List Guidelines do not prohibit the type of
mailing they engaged in.  I disagree.  It states in the very guidelines
that they copied: "Republication of this mailing list, for anything other
than personal use, without the explicit permission of the list owner is a
violation of U.S.  Copyright Law and will be dealt with as such."

IMHO, a "reasonable" interpretation of that includes reproducing the
addresses from the list.  I the email address list is protected as being a
unique collection of information. 

5) They suggest on their web site at http://www.rpgalive.com/mailing.htm 
that David's periodic  post to the comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc is the same type
of practice as what they engaged in.  Nothing could be further than the
truth.  David periodically posted a note to an open, unmoderated Usenet
newsgroup to let folks know about the existance of Midrange-L.  The
equivilent of what the folks at RPG Alive site did would have been for
David to go through the posts to comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc,  and harvest
email addresses from it to send a similar notice via private email.  And as
far as I know, he does NOT do that.

Legal issues aside, I have a fairly low opinion of the behavior this
company engaged in, and won't be recommending them to anyone anytime soon.

-Ilena Ayala
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