Why not just stop the free distribution of valuable genealogical information on this media? Isn't that really what you seem to be advocating. Seems, this controversy would have never reached this level on MAISER. Larry Stephens would have stopped the nonsense long ago. Also, Karen would have said, please post your opinions privately not to the entire ROOTS-L group. Not all responses have been in agreement with you Dr. Leverich. Dwayne Crandall dcrandal@mail.coin.missouri.edu Listmanager CLARY-L, CRAIN-L, and CRANDALL-L ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Let's End the Lawlessness Author: listowners@rootsweb.com at internet-ext Date: 7/19/97 9:10 AM I've found it instructive watching the responses to Cliff Shaw and Matt Roller's theft of other folks' property. I think we need to stop talking and start doing. Here are examples of things we can do: (1) We can start letter-writing campaigns to "upstreams" of offending sites. For example, I have the e-mail addresses for the President, Vice-President, and such of SLCC. Let's write them and make sure they understand their site is harboring a thief. (2) We can "shrinkwrap license" our Internet sites, and obtain much stronger legal protection for our work than copyright alone will provide. (3) We can start moving our data behind search engines. This will improve life for our users, and confound the thieves. (4) We can collectively bring legal action against the more egregious violators. I suspect that if we brought just one Matt Roller or Cliff Shaw to heel with the full force of the law, then an awful lot of bad behavior would suddenly disappear from the Net. And there's bound to be more we can do. Later today RootsWeb will set up COPYRIGHT-L and -D lists. The purpose of COPYRIGHT-L is to allow folks who want to stop the theft of intellectual property to coordinate their actions and start doing something about this mess. I'll see you there. -B -- Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich@rootsweb.com