7 Sep
2004
7 Sep
'04
7:58 p.m.
On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Ashley Carder wrote:
I believe that a complaint can be filed against the
seller and eBay can
shut them down. However, since some of this stuff probably still belongs
to IBM, I would not want someone to attempt to shut down bitsavers because
of this.
Unfortunately, Al really doesn't have any recourse here. First of all, as
you allude, Al does not own the material. He owns the labor he put into
scanning it all, as well as the bandwidth that is used to download the
documents, but those are somewhat intangible. Since Al is not charging
for the documents (he couldn't anyway since he doesn't own the copyright)
and is in fact allowing for them to be freely downloaded, he really can't
prevent people from doing this. If Al tried to sell the documents, or
otherwise charge for access, he steps into a gray area that could get him
into a lot of trouble if someone should decide to prosecute (as far as I
can tell it would be a pretty open and shut case).
The best tool we have is shame. Barry should be shamed for not sharing
the revenues with Al. The idiot in Israel selling the CD as a regular
product in his eBay store should be bombarded with hate mail.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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