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Date:	Sun, 13 Mar 2005 13:09:35 PST8
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-general@scoug.com
To:	scoug-general@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-General: Bad Politics in the Community

Content Type: text/plain

jr_fox@pacbell.net wrote:
>
> The names behind the initials may be familiar to you, though probably not
> to me.

Hi Foxey,

I didn't recognize the J.B. initials so did a WhoIs: os2warp.be is
registered to Jonas Buys, whom I'm not familiar with.

I cannot speak for International copyright law, but in the U.S. simple
lists are (to my knowledge) not copyrightable. The case law on this is
telephone directories; one telephone company tried to keep others from
publishing lists of people and their phone numbers, and the courts held
that the information was not protected by copyright. I'm not aware of
any changes to this basic premise.

In the U.S. the list of OS/2-compatible hardware "by itself" is likely
not protectable by copyright. However, the work involved in creating
the list might be protectable; it depends (in my opinion) on whether it
was done by J.B. in his own laboratory, or instead if he simply
assembled his list by using other lists.

Also, the presentation of the list is likely protectable. If J.B.'s web
page containing the list is "mirrored" then that might be a violation
since that is like photocopying a book. However, if the text is
extracted from J.B.'s web page and placed in a new web page then there
are substantial arguments that the new web page is not a violation.

My opinion only, I'm not a lawyer.

- Peter

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