Tim Shoppa <shoppa_at_alph02.triumf.ca> wrote:
>And you also have to consider that at least 95% of the Walnut
>Creek CD-ROM was simply assembled from materials lying around
>the net and on various CP/M BBS's. I'm not sure how they
>got permission for the remaining 5% (things such as the Ampro
>Little Board BIOS sources, etc.)
That's the big pitfall of publishing supposedly public domain CDs...
even if you are absolutely careful and secure written permission
from everyone who claims to have made something on the disc, you
can never be quite sure that someone wasn't telling the truth,
especially if there's any sort of compensation involved. If you
redistribute something that the creator doesn't want distributed,
you could be in for trouble.
And of course it takes a lot of effort to nicely assemble and
categorize the thousands of files on a CD. That makes a good product,
but not all CDs are as good as they could be.
lisard_at_zetnet.co.uk wrote:
>erm, isn't the walnut creek cd-rom predominantly stocked with the same
>stuff that is on oak? which kind of implies that so long as you aren't
>doing it for profit, it's just another kind of distribution.
It can be tough to tell who really owns what, in terms of the "collection
copyright." By means of analogy, a publisher who makes a book of poems
retains the copyright of the way they assemble the poems, and they need
to secure the right to redistribute each poem, but it doesn't mean they
own the poems. It's possible that the people who organized the Oakland
site never considered that they were sitting on a valuable property.
In 1994 my company secured permission to press a CD of the popular
3D model ftp site called "Avalon" without any payment whatsoever.
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <
http://www.threedee.com/jcm>
Received on Mon Mar 02 1998 - 09:09:44 GMT