[9480] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Inmac, junk mail, and the death of the net.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Deutsch)
Thu Jan 6 18:12:25 1994
From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 1994 17:58:13 -0500
In-Reply-To: Bill Sommerfeld's message as of Jan 6, 17:45
To: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@apollo.hp.com>, crocker@tis.com,
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
[ You wrote: ]
> It occurs to me that an appropriate semi-technical solution to this
> problem is to have finger or fingerd put a copyright notice in its
> output barring redistribution or resale of the information.
>
> This allows the "normal" uses of finger (such as a phone directory
> substitute, or to find if your friend is logged in prior to initiating
> a "talk" link), but prohibits the kind of abuses folks here are
> complaining about.
Modulo the fact that copyright laws vary from country to
country, and given that I'm not a lawyer (and don't even
play one on the Internet) as far as I understand the
current Berne convention there is no need for a specific
copyright notice for something to be copyrighted.
On the other hand that _doesn't_ mean that there's anything
preventing the use of finger to gather such info. I'd
suspect that it may not even have been finger that was
used. Perhaps it was nothing more clever that a filter to
glean account names from Usenet postings, followed by a
merge and purge of site addresses keyed on domain names.
This is the kind of thing a good UNIX weenie could throw
together in his or her sleep. At 410 a pop I can certainly
see the attraction for the people putting them together.
> If you also borrow a trick from the mailing list vendors, and embed
> dummy names in the finger output to catch "cheaters", this might work
> fairly well...
Although as a potential name on the list I'm certainly not
crazy about this idea, I'm still not sure exactly what
"cheating" is going on here (assuming we're only talking
about names at U.S. sites - see my last post). Perhaps
there's an unspoken assumption that we own our own name
and contact info and should have some right to who gets to
use it? It would perhaps be worthwhile to see this point
debated. I'm reasonably confident we're going to find
lots of people who don't like the idea. I'm wondering if
anyone's going to be brave enough to defend the practice,
and if so what their argument's going to be...
- peterd
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What do thay got, a whole lot of sand? We got a hot crustacean band!
Each little clam here, know how to jam here! Under the Sea!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
