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orange.cc.utexas.edu>Barbara Partee indirectly raised an important question in her posting about sending a LINGUISTnet discussion to a newspaper, namely this: what are the laws and conventions governing free speech and/vs. copyright on electronic bulletin boards? It's time that we look more directly at questions like this, because they are going to become increasingly complicated as we increase our use of electronic communications media. The fact is that "laws and conventions" have not kept pace with new communications technology: there are no precedents for the new juxtapositions of media and kinds of messages being transmitted. I'll mention a few of the issues as I understand them to get people thinking and talking about them. If you want to read more about this, you might want to look at I. Pool (1983) _Technologies of Freedom_. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, from which I gleaned some of following information. It's almost a decade old, but it brought to my attention things I didn't know, and I suspect you don't know either. The First Amendment, for instance, applies variously to the three major communications media (broadcast media, common carrier (e.g., telephone lines and U.S. mail), and print) because of differences in scarcity and "indivisibility" of resources. Telephone and mail have been considered "indivisible" because noone can have access to everyone unless everyone is included in the network; therefore these media have enjoyed special protection and government support to assure equal access to everyone (indeed, in many countries, the "P.T.T", including also telegrams, are all government owned and operated). Part of the definition of a common carrier is that it allows one-on-one communication. The privacy of messages communicated by common carrier is protected by strict laws: it is a federal offense to tap a telephone line and to interfere with the U.S. mail. Broadcast frequencies have been apportioned and licensed because only a limited number can be distinguished in a small geographic area, e.g., you can't have several radio stations broadcasting at the same frequency in the same town. Since the messages communicated by broadcasting are ephemeral, it is difficult to cite them and especially to quote them verbatim. (They are rarely of a "scholarly" nature anyway, and so direct citation isn't often an issue for _us_.) And since they reach so many people, who have a choice of only those frequencies to tune in to, free speech is _limited_ in broadcast media; entities which get broadcast licenses have to agree not to pervert the common good. The medium of print, not being subject to either scarcity or indivisibility of resources (anyone can scrape up enough money to publish a newsletter), is the most unrestricted in the matter of free speech. It is also the most durable, and thus quotable, citable, and copyrightable. Thus you can publish virtually anything you want in print, and the laws and conventions regarding quoting, citing, and piracy are quite clear. Now, however, the lines of demarcation between these modes of communication are becoming blurred, and so it is not legally clear whether the protections or freedoms originally accorded to one or another medium now extend to similar "kinds" of communications send out over other media. (For example, some telephone conversations are sent not over wires but over the ether, e.g., via cellular phones and portable phones; there is now a law prohibiting eavesdropping on cellular phone conversations, but it does _not_ yet extend to portable phones (according to the Today Show, July 9).) Furthermore, the points noted here concern the laws of the United States; they do not address international issues at all. Electronic bulletin boards span all three media: they _broadcast_ "print" via _common carrier_. Here are some of the inconsistencies I've noticed, which need to be addressed in order to assure to the scholarly community both maximum free speech and appropriate copyright protection. Since e-mail is sent via common carrier, it is against US law for anyone but the sender and the receiver to look at it without permission. If your department chair or administrative assistant or local "superuser" is in the habit of peeking at your e-mail, that is a federal offense--or is it? Bulletin boards are also sent by common carrier, i.e., over wires. But they are also sent to thousands of recipients, so the one-on-one nature of phone conversations and regular mail isn't there. The sender knows that it's not a private communication and that thousands of strangers will see it, and so can leave out anything that he or she may not want "overheard". That is, the sender has to protect herself from having private things overheard by censoring her own message, as she would if she were talking with several people on speaker or extension phones. But what about the recipients of bulletin boards? Do laws protecting people from obscenity or libel protect them here, given that the medium in question is not broadcasting but common carrier? If I call up my friend and tell him that Barbara Partee is an XYZ and does ABC, that's gossip. But if I "call up" the readership on the LINGUIST net and say the same thing, then what? I'll probably be censured by the linguistics community, but Barbara Partee can't sue me--or can she? Messages posted on bulletin boards are virtual print. But it's not clear that they enjoy the same freedom of speech and copyright protection as real print. It's a well-honored courtesy to acknowledge the source of an unpublished idea as "private communication." But p.c. implies that someone told you something personally, knowing enough about you and what you'd do with the information to risk telling you. It may be stretching things to call an idea gleaned from a bulletin board "p.c." Furthermore, it's not clear that the originator of idea X wants to be quoted on it. A bulletin board is not a refereed journal, nor even a conference presenting working papers, where a person _expects_ to be held accountable for what he or she presents. A bulletin board is a place where informal exchange of ideas takes place. If people have to fear future vilification for their irresponsible publication of stupid, half-baked ideas, they will be very hesitant to write anything to the LINGUIST net. (In fact, this did happen in the early months of LINGUIST. Some people submitted informed but not perfectly formulated remarks or queries to the list, and others, seeing something to critize, hit the reply button and snotted off to the entire subscribership about it. It was then they who came off looking snotty, but it was unpleasant and embarrassing for all.) On they other hand, noone wants other people picking up their nifty ideas and turning them into books of their own with no acknowledgement. But it is often difficult to remember who wrote such-and-such a comment (sometimes the comments come with no names, but only cryptic e-mail addresses, attached). Searching for a key word in the entire text for a given time period (if you can remember the approximate date) may work if you keep copies of all the LINGUIST postings or summon them all from the archives. But it's more difficult than searching the printed articles you've read, because the LINGUIST net presents such a broad range of linguistic topics, and your printed articles are likely to be much more limited in number and scope (and you may have other clues to help you remember where it came from, e.g, it was about half-way through that green book, on the bottom of the left-hand page). This are some of the problems alluded to by Barbara Partee's posting, and we have not yet developed conventions for dealing with them. Let's start with a list of issues: 1. Should we cite LINGUIST postings? 2. If so, how do we cite them? 3. If so, should we assume the same kind of intellectual accountability for the idea as we assume for print publication? Or should we all learn to recognize that any bulletin board citation carries with it this caution: warning: this idea may be weak (but if it turns out to be strong, _X_ gets credit for it)? 4. Corollary to 3: Do we need to get prior permission from authors of LINGUIST postings before we cite their ideas? 5. If LINGUIST postings are citable, can we list them on our c.v. as publications? (Whew! think of what that would do to the length of "some people's" c.v.'s!) If so, should they be given a status apart from the others, since they were unrefereed, not submitted to approval by the scholarly community? 6. Should LINGUIST postings be considered copywrited, or should citing them simply be a courtesy? 7. Should bulletin board postings be governed by anti-libel and anti-obscenity laws? or should the community of subscribers or the moderators handle this informally? 8. How are answers to these questions, and others that will arise, affected by the fact that LINGUIST is international? Here are a few of *my* suggestions relative to these issues: a. Assume that whatever you read on LINGUIST is the intellectual property of the person who sent it. That means you must cite it if you use it publicly in any way. b. Sign your postings; don't expect people to tease your identity from your e-mail return address. c. If you as the originator of a posting do NOT want to be quoted or cited, make that very clear in the posting. It seems to me that if you will not take responsibility for the posting, then you also make no claim to it; thus if other people appropriate it and call it their own, with no reference to you, you have right to complain about it. d. Perhaps the moderators or the subscribership could compile a list of key words to use in the message headings, to make searching for postings easier. This is done on an ad hoc basis now, but the headings are perhaps not as helpful as they could be. d. You may list your LINGUIST postings on your c.v., but they should be given a separate, non-refereed, status. I would like to invite other subscribers of LINGUIST to read Pool's book, find other things to read, including up-to-date information about how the First Amendment and privacy/copyright laws are being interpreted, raise other questions, make other suggestions, and share them with the rest of the community. For the record, I claim this posting as my intellectual property (acknowledging my debt to I. Pool's book). If you refer to it, please acknowledge me and cite this posting, this bulletin board, and today's date, July 13, 1992. (And I, once again, acknowledge and thank Helen and Anthony, and their sponsoring institutions, for initiating and maintaining this wonderful resource.) Christine Kamprath Note: There are many issues raised by the "convergence of modes" (Pool's term) that are not directly relevant to bulletin boards but are relevant to differential application of the laws to the various communication modes, and thus to our understanding of the extensions of free speech and copyright/privacy laws, e.g., books can be put on-line and sent by common carrier, television programs are often sent by common carrier (cable) and are easily video-taped, phone messages are broadcast as well as sent by wire, etc. These may all be important areas for us to inform ourselves about, possibly via this bulletin board. _____________________ [Moderators' note: The problem of citing postings from LINGUIST is a complex one. We know of a number of linguistic articles and papers which have either mentioned LINGUIST discussions, or indeed have actually utilized them as data for discourse analysis. None of these, to our knowledge, contained quotes from postings, however. Our main goal as moderators is to facilitate the exchange of information, and to that end we have always maintained a liberal policy with regard to LINGUIST postings. We have always felt, for example, that other lists--and individuals--should be allowed to forward our mailings freely, and have never attempted to place any restrictions on this. We have also always felt that LINGUIST should constitute a relatively unrestrained medium, one in which subscribers feel free to post half-formed ideas, in the hope that, through the following discussion, those ideas can be refined. However, to some degree these policies of ours are in conflict. The more LINGUIST postings are disseminated, the more we will all feel pressured to submit only carefully constructed messages. To prevent any loss of spontaneity, we've attempted to place what we feel is a reasonable limit on the dissemination of postings. This limit is summarized in the introductory message which all new subscribers receive, as follows: "The list is moderated and submissions are subject to editorial discretion. But moderating is as light-handed as we can make it, since we wish to encourage free and open interchange. You are at liberty to pass on and disseminate any LINGUIST message provided it is clearly attributed to LINGUIST. But you may only publish LINGUIST postings with the permission of both the list moderators and the original author of the message." This policy--like all LINGUIST policies--is open for discussion and/or revision by subscribers. We certainly don't think that the newspaper article which prompted this discussion was in any way out of line. But what do you think of this policy as a general quideline, particularly applicable to quotation in academic contexts? Anthony & Helen A footnote: we think Christine's suggestion of signing postings is a good one. Many people don't--more from modesty, we suspect, than anything else--probably assuming that putting their name in the heading once is enough. But it's helpful to the reader to have the full name at the end as well. Why don't we all try to establish this etiquette? OOPS. . . . Helen DRY & Anthony ARISTAR. . . .]Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue