ridecamp@endurance.net: Re: [endurance] E-mail to the world -- Does this mean ...?

Re: [endurance] E-mail to the world -- Does this mean ...?

Linda B. Merims (lbm@kirk.ici.net)
Tue, 19 Mar 96 08:27:05 EST

At 07:14 PM 3/18/96 -0800, Joe (jpu@kaiwan.com) wrote:

>Gee, folks, does this mean we are all authors?
>
>Does that mean we can all claim to have published?
>
>Does that mean that our publications have been found worthy of world-wide
> distribution?
>
>Gee, does this mean that we should be planning autograph tours?
>
>Just being silly, folks. :-? Hope you can *endure* it. :-)
>
>Joe jpu@kaiwan.com

Well, yes, sort of. It has raised some very interesting issues
about copyright. So far, until tested or relegislated otherwise,
for the most part if you wrote it, you own it.

The other thing these Web crawlers are capable of finding are
e-mail addresses. The Direct Marketers are drooling over the
prospects. So far, sending unsolicited commercial e-mail is
often (but not always) grounds for getting your account cancelled.
It depends entirely on how responsible the service provider or upstream
service provider feels about the whole thing. MCI will chop of an
entire site if it does not deal with e-mail "spammers." However, the
great and terrible America Online is *not* disciplining e-mail spammers,
nor taking a stand against e-mail spam being sent to its customers.
(Compuserve does and is.) Instead, it seems to view its clients
as assets to be sold to the Direct Marketers. Expect it to all end up
in a legislative/regulatory battle.

Linda B. Merims
lbm@ici.net
Massachusetts, USA