
Editorial - Copyrights and Electronic Publishing
by Dave Bealer

Time again for a serious editorial.  In the past few months several
people took it upon themselves to "help promote RAH" by posting RAH 
articles, or complete RAH issues, in public conferences.  These
people were genuinely surprised by the fact that I wanted to them to
stop the practice.  This situation calls for an explanation.

RAH was first published as a plain ASCII text magazine.  The original
intent was for RAH to be distributed only in ZIP archive form on BBS
systems.  To accommodate systems that don't support unZIP utilities,
it was decided to allow complete uncompressed ASCII text editions of
RAH to be made available for download.  To allow use on systems that
don't have actual download functions, permission was given for sysops
to make the ASCII text edition available for online display.  This
would allow users with terminal software that can "capture" an online
session to grab a copy online, then read the resultant text file
offline at their leisure.  The uncompressed ASCII Text edition turned
out to be ideal for Internet users, many of whom have no access to
dearchive utilities.

None of this is intended to allow posting of RAH articles, or RAH
issues, in online conferences.  Such action probably constitutes
republishing of the work in question, which in the case of
copyrighted material is illegal without written permission of the
copyright holder.  Opinion is actually divided on whether public
posting online constitutes publication, but it seems likely the
"public posting = publication" viewpoint will win out in the end.  
I have decided to act as though that will be the outcome until
definitive evidence to the contrary is available.
                              - - -
As announced for the past several months, this will be the last issue
of RAH until the September issue hits the boards.  It will be fun to
see how much mail is generated this summer from readers who still
haven't figured this out.                                       {RAH}

