The post I was talking about, which was the one to which Hec, etc. were referring to, was just a request for the aired episodes with an "I'll pay for materials" tacked on.

I thought he was charging for DVD burns. Still, it's good to be reminded that one copyright suit and b.org would be gone like Fred's innards. [Angel spoiler whited out]

There was a sep item going on in there with the unaired eps. Some folks buying the press kit and then charging around $1.50 to cover costs to duplicate the DVD's of the unaired eps and distribute them. That the discussion that hits the danger zone. It's really the $1.50 charge that puts it completely into the red zone. As soon as money is exchanged it gets really ugly.

I think at the very least we can insist that people take that kind of discussion to private email.

Maybe a disclaimer to that effect as well.

Can you link, ND? I missed those too. I remember people offering to pay, but no one asking.

By the way...

Oh, so now you want to be part of the SOLUTION? (39%)

has taken a commanding lead. I think that's the next thread title.

Here's the message that triggered my warning bells.

Number_6 "The Minearverse 2: Getting his words out." Apr 8, 2004 9:00:26 pm PDT

Oh. I had just thought that was expenses, but it's been forever since I bought DVDRs.

Key, I think is being clear that while we don't encourage illegal posting/actions, only the poster is responsible for each post's contents. If we start monitoring to see what's legal, then we are assuming responsibility and it would seem liability.

So while we might give it a shot, I think we need to be firm on pointing litigators to people, not the collective.

The lawyers among us may be able to shed some light on this, but I know recently what I've seen with these kinds of fights the trend has been to name everyone, which would include Buffistas.org, as well as our hosting company, and whatever company they are getting their bandwidth from. It's been the shotgun approach, hit everyone with both barrels to try to shut as much down by fear as possible.

It was parsed in such a was as to be recovering expenses, but it was still paying for an exchange of copyrighted goods.

Not a lawyer, obviously, but I do have a communications degree, and I took a mass media law class last year, so I have a lot of recent information on some of this.

It looks like it falls under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which was created I believe in 1998 to include the internet in copyright law. Basically, it extends the basic copyright principles to digital media, requires royalties to be paid for internet radio, etc. However, ISPs are exempt from liability "if they are only conduits."

The problem is that if we are providing a medium for people to meet and exchange information and money, we are considered more than conduits. This is all really new, so a lot of it is pretty fuzzy right now. At this point I think it's mostly being used to get companies like Napster.

I don't know if that helps, but I think ND's impression is fairly correct.

Then basically, we're fucked, aren't we? We exchange tapes (sometimes for barter or expenses) all the time. We have a thread for it.