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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 2002-01 > 1012170788


From: (Stewart Baldwin)
Subject: Re: U.S. Copyright Law (was: several related threads with diffeent titles)
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 22:33:08 GMT
References: <a9b2ce02.0201240644.3236c7ea@posting.google.com>, <3c530b56.12082630@news.ifb.co.uk>, <a9b2ce02.0201270621.d444576@posting.google.com>


On 27 Jan 2002 06:21:24 -0800, (Bryant Smith)
wrote:

[much snipping]

>...
>If authors are _not_ concerned about the future marketability of
>their works then we come back to my earlier remark about conflicts
>of an essentially personal nature.
>...

It is not just the future marketability of the pirated works
themselves which is in question here, but also the scholarly
reputations of the individuals involved. Although this is more
directly relevant to those who earn a living at genealogy (e.g.,
Paul), it is not a trivial matter even to people like me who don't
depend on genealogy to put food on the table. (Also, you never know
what the future will bring. The possibility of doing genealogy for
hire at some point in the future is an option that I would like to
keep open in case I ever need it, and in such an eventuality my
reputation as a genealogist would be an important factor.) Thus, a
pirated article taken without the author's permission, and mangled by
an incompetent job of editing that makes the author's work look bad,
has the possibility of damaging the author's professional reputation.
(See below for an example of this.)

>...
>If the case is one merely of cutting-and-pasting whole articles into
>a journal I would not disagree. However (not having seen the journal
>article[s] objected to) if it is a case of reporting an academic
>controversy by setting forth the opposing ideas and supporting
>authorities, without too much in the way of verbatim quotation,
>it seems clear that, in the U.S. at least, the public purpose served
>by copyright would protect the publication of the journal article.
>...

One of the problems in many of the statements that you have made on
this subject is that you do not appear to have been around in this
newsgroup when the matter was discussed in excrutiating detail back in
early 2000 (at least I didn't see any postings from you for 2000 when
I checked your name in the archives), so it looks like you are trying
to offer opinions on a case with which you are not very familiar.
(Note that Jim Robinson, an attorney who was following this matter
back when it came up in 2000, and who is clearly much more familiar
with the details of the specific matter than you are, has contradicted
some of your statements in his own postings.)

For the benefit of "latecomers" like yourself, to give a specific
example (not the only one which occurred prior to when things came to
a head in January of 2000) of an entire posting of significant length
which was lifted almost verbatim without the permission of the author
(myself), I refer you to a posting with subject line "Kings of Man -
Table" which appeared in this newsgroup on 11 October 1997. On 12
April, in answer to a short question which was asked by another
individual in a posting with subject line "Africa + Africa", I posted
a response which consisted of a short comment, followed by a
cut-and-paste reposting of the previous "Kings of Man" posting (which
of course I am allowed to do, since it was my own material).

It was the second of those two postings (under the silly title of "The
Two Affricas" which was suggested by the subject line in the message
to which I was responding) which Ken Finton published in the April
1998 issue of "The Plantagenet Connection" without my knowledge or
consent, and I only became aware of the matter after the issue had
already been published. The major editorial change was to change the
font of some of my carefully composed genealogical tables, changing
the spacing, and thereby making the tables nonsensical, and looking so
foolish (with my name attached) that any competent proofreader would
have noticed immediately that something was amiss. Given such a
incompetent job of editing as in the present example, it should not be
so surprising why Paul Reed and I (and others who have voiced their
concerns in private) don't want our material to be appropriated by
"The Plantagenet Connection".

If you were at all familiar with the journal in question, you would
know that it has often consisted in part (though not entirely) of
verbatim (or nearly verbatim) quotes taken directly from postings to
this newsgroup. Since you have now made it clear that you are not
really all that familiar with the specific case in question, it makes
me wonder why you have been so free to offer legal opinions regarding
it without first finding out whether or not your comments have any
relevance to the specific case. I suggest that you bone up by reading
some of the postings on the subject that occurred during January of
2000.

Stewart Baldwin

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