From mfbowman@CapAccess.org Mon Apr 13 22:09:03 1998 Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 22:09:02 -0400 (EDT) From: "Michael F. Bowman" To: "David L. Eby" Subject: Re: Introduction to Scouts-L In-Reply-To: <35327060.D5C7FCC5@geocities.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: RO X-Status: Dave, Welcome to Scouts-L. Hope you enjoy and contribute to the discussions. You may enjoy visiting http://usscouts.org/profbvr/firecrafter/index.html for a look at the Firecrafter organization that I'm putting together. One of the projects that I've meant to get started on was a listing of all former honor camper associations for the U.S. Scouting Service Project website. It looks, however, like you've already really covered the ground. We've been looking to build up our collection of Scouting history pages. Would you be interested in being a contributor? We have a high volumn of visits and are always looking to improve our holdings. In the last couple of months our pages have received about a half million hits from visitors. Mike Speaking in | mfbowman@usscouts.org netcommish@aol.com the Scouting | The NetCommish http://members.aol.com/netcommish Spirit from | Professor Beaver Online - http://usscouts.org/profbvr/ Alexandria, VA| U.S. Scouting Service Project - http://usscouts.org From mfbowman@CapAccess.org Tue Apr 14 01:17:51 1998 Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 01:17:50 -0400 (EDT) From: "Michael F. Bowman" To: Rick Seymour Subject: Re: Copyright Law & Old BSA Materials? In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19980328163223.007c75e0@scouter.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: RO X-Status: Rick, I am a lawyer and also the webmaster for USSSP. In your posting (now several days old) you indicated that you were interested in publishing some of Hillcourt's old manuals via the web and if there were no copyright problems would put it on the USSSP server. You should be aware that the U.S. Scouting Service Project, Inc. is a not-for-profit corporation chartered in the State of Missouri and as such separate and distinct from Scouter Magazine where you are a contributing editor. Each organization has a separate server for its primary web/Internet activity. We do have mutually supportive links and indices. Unlike our website, the USSSP FTP site is hosted on the scouter.com server but still is under the control of USSSP. The FTP site is now a mirror of content found at http://clipart.usscouts.org which includes both images and documents. Material may be added to this archive only by the archive administrators, Chris Marsey, Gary Hendra, and myself. We try to screen what is placed in the archive to assure that there are no copyright infringements and to make sure that it is consistent with Scouting values. Our archive started out originally as the Pluto ftp site in Dallas. When its owner was no longer able to maintain it, we stepped in and provided a new home for it. Since then much has been added. As we have grown we have also recognized that some contributions early on may have been subject to copyrights. As a result we have dropped some shareware, songs, stories, etc. from the archive to avoid infringing privately held copyrights. We are concerned not to infringe copyrights and will remove any material that would infringe a copyright where we do not have permission for its use. The exception to this is material which is copyrighted to scouting organizations which have allowed free distribution of materials. For example, BSA does allow Scouters to reproduce and distribute its materials for Scouting use. BSA is aware of our archive and has thus far not voiced any concern with it. In fact they have copies of our CD at National and are using it as a resource. With regard to books the general rule is that the copyright continues for fifty years after the death of the author. For that reason we are able now to reproduce books by B-P. Hillcourt's books may still be subject to copyright following this rule. I do not know whether the copyrights to the Hillcourt books are held by BSA or the Hillcourt estate. If the copyrights to the handbooks are held by BSA, then we probably could include them under the implicit permission granted by BSA for reproduction. Even so, I think I would like to have more explicit permission from BSA for something like an entire handbook. If the copyrights are held by the estate, then it would be up to the trustees including Terry Howerton to determine whether the books could be published. For example, the book Two Lives of A Hero is published by Terry under that copyright protection. With recent decisions regarding web content in the courts, it is becoming clear that contributors and web hosts can face liability for infringements. As a result, I am particularly sensitive to exercising care in adding material so as to avoid infringement. Mike Speaking in | mfbowman@usscouts.org netcommish@aol.com the Scouting | The NetCommish http://members.aol.com/netcommish Spirit from | Professor Beaver Online - http://usscouts.org/profbvr/ Alexandria, VA| U.S. Scouting Service Project - http://usscouts.org From mfbowman@CapAccess.org Tue Apr 14 01:49:23 1998 Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 01:49:21 -0400 (EDT) From: "Michael F. Bowman" To: Dave Loomis Subject: Copyrights In-Reply-To: <351EEACE.800@nh.ultranet.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: RO X-Status: Dave, Please pardon me for not responding more swiftly. Seems I sometimes get behind the curve on e-mail when I have to be away a few days and it takes forever and a day to catch up. Your posting regarding copyrights was intriguing to me. Apparently you must do archival work for AOL's Scouting Forum, if I get the drift of what you were saying. Copyright issues are a bit thorny and often mixed with a lot of feeling, not always grounded in law. Which is to say that it can be a little complex to sort things out. Although the interpretation is far from universal, the prevailing opinion in law seems to be that postings to a public forum or discussion list made without an explicit reservation of rights are public domain and may be used by anyone without further permission. The theory is that the contributor is aware that his/her material will be available and will be used by others and thus grants it freely, unless he/she takes some step to alert others of an intent to reserve rights. The courts have been loath to find an implicit copyright, because to do so would vest any communication with restrictive rights and inhibit the free flow and exchange of ideas. Thus, it becomes imperative for an author to explicitly stake out a claim to copyright for it to have any hope of enforcement. Hence the necessity of using the (c) symbol to signify material that is copyrighted. Original material not so annotated will generally be presumed to be public domain, unless there is some other restrictive legend that preserves the rights of the author. For those reasons I would disagree about the nature of Internet postings being inherently copyrighted. This is a separate issue from exercising responsible journalism by avoiding plagerism; e.g., giving credit to original authors regardless of copyrights. As Scouters we need to credit original authors when they are known and acknowledge the source of information. For example, USSSP keeps a selected archive of Scouts-L postings. Each one includes the authors identity, unless the author has requested that his/her identity be withheld (often due to fear of reprisal from a local Council for asking questions on the net)[this is rare and infrequent]. Similarly, you'll find at http://usscouts.org/profbvr contributor acknowledgements on each web area to credit each person who has provided content. Pow Wow publications and roundtable handouts are a difficult thing to discipline. Many of the people that make them up use any material that seems to help out regardless of whether it is copyrighted or not and seldom credit their sources. For example, providing the words to a song may create a problem, if the words are themselves copyrighted. For most of these situations the organizations that hold the copyrights tend to not enforce their rights because the use is not intended to make a profit or to directly raise funds. However, when this is translated to an online archive where the host may have commercial endeavors the complection of the situation shifts and concerns heighten. In our own situation we dumped a lot of shareware, songs, and stories from our archives before printing a CD to avoid problems. As we add new content we are also concerned with the same issues and strive to keep a keen eye. We aren't always successful I suspect and mistakes are made. However, we have encouraged folks to be more careful and in one case have had material withdrawn and replaced with content that was original to the author without other material that was "borrowed" without credit and/or permission. I'm not sure that there are many easy answers to how to deal with the high volume of material we all see, but it seems certain that we have to remain careful and watchful. Most of all we have to encourage care in giving credit where it is due, even when material is not subject to any particular protection. This goes a long way towards avoiding clashes that can be emotionally charged. Mike Speaking in | mfbowman@usscouts.org netcommish@aol.com the Scouting | The NetCommish http://members.aol.com/netcommish Spirit from | Professor Beaver Online - http://usscouts.org/profbvr/ Alexandria, VA| U.S. Scouting Service Project - http://usscouts.org From mfbowman@CapAccess.org Wed Apr 15 00:33:50 1998 Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 00:33:48 -0400 (EDT) From: "Michael F. Bowman" To: "David L. Eby" Subject: Re: Introduction to Scouts-L In-Reply-To: <3532DB25.8578ED4C@geocities.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: RO X-Status: Dave, Thanks for your quick responses. My apologies for not being very clear. USSSP has been built by a number of Scouters who have contributed written material, web pages, graphics and the like to build it as a resource center. Some folks have contributed a single piece others have become more regular and provide information every so often as appropriate for a topic. What I was thinking about was trying to get a few folks like you and Rick Seymour to do was to develop pages on Scouting history on topics of your choice that could be shared with other Scouters. Of course we'd be happy to also have a set of pages with your material on other honor camper organizations on the USSSP server to spread the information as far as we can. I had thought about developing a similar set of pages based on my early work regarding Firecrafter, but realized that it might be better to see whether we could mirror your content with credit to you as the author. On our home page you'll find a link to contributors and team members where we identify the many folks that help make the website grow. We also identify contributors on the pages where their work is displayed. Our hope is to continue to keep attracting new material and to expand the collection of resources to be one of the foremost resources for Scouting on the net. If you'd be uncomfortable with mirroring content we'd still like to have a summary page explaining other honor camping associations with a link to the pages you have on your site. The only format guidelines we use are that we like to have the USSSP logo bar at the top, copyright information at the bottom and a common background image that is used throughout the website to help identify all pages as part of the same website. Mike Speaking in | mfbowman@usscouts.org netcommish@aol.com the Scouting | The NetCommish http://members.aol.com/netcommish Spirit from | Professor Beaver Online - http://usscouts.org/profbvr/ Alexandria, VA| U.S. Scouting Service Project - http://usscouts.org From mfbowman@CapAccess.org Wed Apr 15 00:47:57 1998 Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 00:47:56 -0400 (EDT) From: "Michael F. Bowman" To: Rick Seymour Subject: Re: Copyright Law & Old BSA Materials? In-Reply-To: <199804141510590210.0178E926@mail.scouter.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: RO X-Status: Rick, Howdy! I've been thinking for some time that we need to expand USSSP's coverage of Scouting's heritage. In fact I've been talking with Dave Elby about including some of his work on early honor camping associations. I had also thought it would be good to solicit material from folks with good solid backgrounds, such as yours to contribute content. I'd be delighted to have pages from you for the USSSP collection including an update to the page referenced on the Scouter Compass. We need to expand our coverage of this area. Depending on what you think you might want to do we could add pages to our gold collection of Scouting topics or perhaps even open up an area devoted to Scouting history. Regarding the Hillcourt books, I suspect that you are absolutely right that they were for BSA and that BSA has the copyrights which have a 75 year life, if they were renewed after the change to the copyright laws. We've been talking with BSA about a number of things and hopefully will get a better idea of how they feel about material from handbooks. I suspect that this will not be a problem. Mike Speaking in | mfbowman@usscouts.org netcommish@aol.com the Scouting | The NetCommish http://members.aol.com/netcommish Spirit from | Professor Beaver Online - http://usscouts.org/profbvr/ Alexandria, VA| U.S. Scouting Service Project - http://usscouts.org