A first

[Bill Fosher]

I have deleted a post from Cory.

He or she forwarded some anti-NAIS material from a list and provided no means of authenticating it.

I want to make clear that the reason that I removed the post was not because of its content. We all know that Cory and I have different views on NAIS. It was because of the fact that it was second hand, and had apparently been forwarded by someone else before Cory forwarded it. I will not have second- and third-hand material posted on this board without attribution or the means to authenticate it.

Part of the material appeared to be a news story about an Australian animal tracking system, but there was no information about where the item was published originally. There are two problems with this. First is authenticity -- Cory doesn't know where the information came from and has no knowledge of its truth or falsity. Just that it came from an anti-NAIS list. Given the fact that I know these lists are regularly used to intentionally distribute falsehoods, such as the government wants to track your animals from space using sattelites, I will not allow such dubious material posted here.

The second is copyright. If the material was a legitimate news story, the copyright to it is held by the organization that produced it. If it's freely available on that organization's web site (as opposed to being available to subscribers only), I would allow a posting of a brief synopsis of the article, the poster's own analysis of its import, and a link to the website so that any and all can read the article in its entirity, see the source and judge for themselves how much credibility it has.

There was additional, political material that was also passed along second- or third-hand. I have no issue with political material being passed along, but again, it must be with the permission of the author and with some way of verifying its authenticity.

Cory, if you want to follow those ground rules, feel free to post again.

[Cory]

Bill,
The news story came from ABC news as was obviuos from the web address. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/20 ... 722960.htm
If you would have read it you should have seen it. It is all on a public web page so I don't know what your problem is.

As for the "political" material it was posted and cross posted on many sites and lists so again it is public knowledge.

[Bill Fosher]

Cory,

I did read your entire post. I believe this URL was not included in what you posted. Perhaps it was dropped when you cut and pasted. If you had read the public website from which the article you forwarded was copied, you would have seen the notice at the bottom of the page indicating that it was copyrighted by the Australian Broadcasting Company. (Not ABC News, incidentally.) Whoever posted it to the list where you got it violated the terms of the use of the ABC website by forwarding it to the list, not to mention copyright law. You expanded those violations by copying the story here.

You also violated the rules of this forum, which were laid out on the day I set it up, and which have not changed since then. They are posted in the stickies at the top of each section of the forum. Here's a quotation from the sticky at the top of the "General Management" forum, titled, "Welcome! Please read before posting."

"... you must not violate copyrights. That means no posting someone else's words, pictures, or thoughts -- with or without attribution -- unless you have their specific permission to do so. I will remove questionable posts and warn users that have posted them. "

The only reason that I made this discussion public is because of the level of paranoia in the anti-NAIS crowd. I wanted it on the record what my reasons were -- and more importantly were not -- for removing Cory's post.

The mere fact that something is on a public website does not mean that it can be copied and retransmitted without the permission of the writer. The fact that others have copied and retransmitted the material first doesn't make it any less incumbent on others to obey the copyright law.

The politcal material purports to be from one particular author who is not a member of this forum. I have no way of knowing whether she has agreed to have her material distributed. Or, indeed, if she is really the author of it.

Lest there be any question about it in the future, I restated my rules in the above post. If you want to abide by those rules, fine. Have at it. If not, that's fine too. I'll just keep deleting your posts. After I've deleted enough of them, I'll disable your account.

The same rules apply to all "cross posted" material, regardless of content.

[Cory]

Bill,
I see no reason why the URL would come though when I copied and pasted the second time but not the first. Anyways from now on I will just post a link. One question for you. When you repost something from a government web site that's ok because it is the government?

[Bill Fosher]

Generally speaking there's no copyright on government documents. They are, pretty much by definition, in the public domain.

Whenever anything is posted, however, I do want to have a link to the original, or a foot-note type attribution so that folks can look up the original if they care to.

Incidentally, there are fair-use exceptions to copyright that allow the use of brief passages of copyrighted work for educational or critical purposes. You're also free to provide a synopsis of the material in your own words. Again, I just ask that link to the original work be included if possible so that people can review it.