[Air-l] more on copyright

[Sandra Braman]

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