[R] Wikibooks

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On 3/30/07, Sarah Goslee <sarah.goslee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro <albmont at centroin.com.br> wrote:
> > Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
> > >
> > > I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives
> > > anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include
> > > that in a Wiki?
> > >
> > Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely
> > copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted
> > things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today,
> > but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world.

There's a difference between public archiving and copying.

> It's not that simple. Dealing with international contributors it's even worse.
> Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list
> post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that
> post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular
> description of the ideas). (Of course, if the ideas are original to the author,
> it's good form to acknowledge that regardless of whether the exact words
> are used).

I believe this is true for all countries that are signatory to the
Berne convention (which is pretty much all countries [1]). The US in
fact was one of the later ones to get into it, before which you had to
explicitly copyright things if you wanted copyright.

-Deepayan

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Berne_Convention.png