IP: Washington Post sending lawyer letters to copyright

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Posted-Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 14:11:35 -0400
From: Lorrie Faith Cranor <lorracks () dworkin wustl edu>
Subject: Washington Post sending lawyer letters to copyright violators
To: farber () central cis upenn edu


FYI, The Washington Post has its lawyers on the offensive, trolling
the Web for copyright violations.


Yesterday my department chair received a faxed lawyer letter from the
staff attorney of the Washington Post complaining that our
cec.wustl.edu web site "currently has posted at least one Washington
Post article."  The letter asked that we immediately "cease and desist
from further use of this or other Post articles without The Post's
permission."  


After some research it was determined that said article was an article
in the "Computers and Society Articles Collection" which I maintain
for a course I teach.  The article in question was from May 26, 1993
and described what happened after Mike Godwin lost most of his
possessions in a moving van fire.  At this point I do not remember
where I got the article, but it was likely off of a newsgroup or
mailing list, perhaps your IP list.


While I respect the Post's desire to enforce their copyrights, it
struck me as rather strange that they went to the trouble of tracking
down my department chair's name, address, and fax number before making
any attempts to contact me (or my class computer account) via email.
It seems obvious to me that if one is concerned about an article at
http://cec.wustl.edu/~cs142/articles/.... one might try contacting
cs142 () cec wustl edu or webmaster () cec wustl edu to ask them to remove
the article.  In this case it appears they must have poked around a
bit to determine what department I was in before sending the letter,
which means they must have read other web pages in the class account
and could easily have come up with my name and personal email address.


BTW, back when I put this article in my class web, I believe it was
probably legal to do so under fair use, as the only people who would have
access to it were those who could find the URL, which was just my class.
And photocopying a newspaper article for one's class is generally
considered fair use.  Three years later everyone and their mother is
on the web and catalogs like Altavista make it possible for people to
find the URLs for my class web pages.  Thus, by putting the article on
my class web page I am essentially posting it publically and
authorizing unlimited reproduction.  Thus, I believe the Post is
justified in asking that the article be removed (and I have removed
it) -- although I'm not sure why they cared enough about one
three-year-old article to go to such trouble.  It's their method I
criticize.


Lorrie Cranor