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.

Tapes or CDs aren't covered by the DMCA because these don't have built-in technology to prevent copying. At least I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

Aha. Though some CDs don't.

If this is something for which the board will be held liable, then it needs to be trumpeted everywhere.

However, as stated before, if we start being diligent, we'd better be thoroughly diligent. And I don't think we can be.

That's my impression, too. The reason the DMCA was created is because it's considered so easy to distribute materials to millions of people just by making it available for download. A tape thread seems no different from people selling VCDs on ebay or something. It's not anything you want to publicize, but not what the law was created to stop. I'm concerned about information about BT or other download sites, though, especially if people are linking there from here.

The DMCA issue is separate from the copyright issue. You can break the DMCA without breaking copyright laws, and vice-versa.

Merely installing DVD playing software on a Linux computer requires breaking the DMCA. If someone here posted instructions on how to copy a copy-protected DVD (or even posted a link to a site that explained it) they'd be breaking the DMCA without necessarily breaking copyright law.

I suppose I should say that I am not a lawer, and this should not be construed as legal advice.

I know this is obvious, but I'll say it anyway. 20th Century's concern is that we're stepping on their toes w/r/t profiting off their property. Exchanging the tapes or DVDs is probably not going to raise alarms.

Even though I think the likelihood of action against a party with no pockets is low, it behooves us to be careful about people using this forum to profit off 20th Century's property. But it is also relevant that, without a DVD set yet, we don't make a dent in their margins.

Now, my suggestion (not legal), is just not to make Minearverse hospitable to trading of any kind. We're not ebay, and it's not content we need. We're not a goddamn bulletin board, either.