Russell McMahon wrote:

> I'm not so sure as, along with the copyright notice, I issued the 
> commercial terms under which copying was allowed including level of 
> payments required, and presumably these terms will have been accepted 
> by those whose websites said utterances turn up on. 

I don't think this has any legal relevance. WRT piclist mirrors, your terms
are worse than the worst fine print on an insurance contract; in essence,
they are hidden to a point where it is certain that they don't get read by
any mirror admins. So your assumption that they have been seen by them (a
requirement for the assumption that they have been accepted) doesn't hold.
You'd have to address these people directly if you want to address them.

I also think that in most jurisdictions you need to show a damage for being
able to claim a right in court. This is not just a technicality, this is
(where it exists) an essential part. Maybe if you sold your collected
utterances on a CD... "A Russell for Every Day" or something like that :)

There may be (and often are) other restrictions on how contracts have to be
in order to be legal. Just because you say so doesn't mean the conditions
in the contract are in force. I'm (almost) sure there are jurisdictions
where most if not all of your contract is void.

There's also the thing about citation. As long as the message is attributed
to you, it's a form of citation, which in certain contexts (and certain
jurisdictions) is not a breach of copyright and therefore not bound by your
contractual conditions.

There's another, more moral, twist of the story. Are you sure that for
every bit you learned for free from the net you contributed back another
bit? I think for most of us the balance is positive (meaning we learned
more for free than we contributed for others to learn for free). So what's
the problem? There is no "natural" right to copyright; it (like most other
rights) is something that has to make sense in a given context, and as the
context changes, has to show that it continues to make sense. Applying
previous regulations ("previous" in the sense of "created for a context
prior to the existence of the internet") to an environment that is proving
to be a prototype of a win-win situation and limit its ability to be this
may just not make sense. This may not allow certain ways to make money, but
this is a normal thing and not relevant in the bigger picture.

Gerhard

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