Legality of Posting Received E-Mail to Netnews?

[John Chambers]

In article <2247 at riscy.enet.dec.com>, frank at croton.nyo.dec.com (Frank Wortner) writes:
>
> Be very careful when you make statements about copyright, patent, or
> other  intellectual  property  law.   It's  too easy to get into BIG
> TROUBLE.  If you have any doubts or  questions  about  copyright  or
> other  legal  issues,  consult  a  lawyer.   You could save yourself
> tremendous amounts of legal grief.
>
> If anyone cares to continue this topic, I've directed  followups  to
> misc.legal.  They certainly don't belong in comp.unix.ultrix.

Well, now, I don't think I agree with this.  Case in point:  I've been
involved  is some discussions recently that derive from my attempts to
make some sense out of our email mess.  The basic problem  here  isn't
that  we need a good email package.  The problem is that we have a lot
of them, each one by itself quite usable, but  incompatible  with  its
neighbors.   When  you  try  to get cooperation from the supporters of
each, you invariably get a lot of suggestions  that  if  you  had  any
brains  at  all,  you  would  just  use package ______ and those other
turkeys should just slink off into the bushes and quietly die, and you
are an idiot for not seeing this.

This is, of course, just a lot of arrogant insults, and when  I  point
this  out,  I  invariably  get a lot of "What the hell are you talking
about, turkey?" responses.  So I collect some of the most insulting of
the lot and mail or post them, together with the observation that this 
is not helping to solve the problems.

It seems to me that this is quite germane to the problem at hand. Note
that the problem  isn't  technical.   The  problem  is  the  arrogant,
insulting and uncooperative nature of many of the people that you have
to deal with to get a job done.  It really  helps  to  illustrate  the
problem if you can publish quotes. If this is illegal, then the people
that are the cause of the problems can continue to get away with their
actions, and we can't solve the problems.

How many times have we seen "RTFM" when it is obvious that the  writer
had tried TFM and not understood it?

-- 
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