Simultaneous first-party posting is okay, of course.  The main difficulty
is the inclusion of complete articles without permission, where they
exceed what would be considered "fair use".  Having seen many of
the discussions about GEnie/Compuserve et. al. on the net regarding
feeds in or out, there does seem to be a real possibility of these getting
annoyed.  It wasn't so much the duplicate messages, but the whole-scale
copying of many messages without permission.  This is no different
from my policies regarding redistribution of the FML, or what the
majority of people more-or-less expect from USENET.  Further, with
this latest virus thing, most of it seemed rather panicky, disjointed,
and contradictory.  I'd prefer either official notices (like Dr.  Kawasaki's
or Chip's post of the AFA one) with permission, or careful synopsis of
other messages.  I'd like to be timely, but I also don't want to
rumour- or scare-monger.  Remember Fara's comments about BBSes?  The
FML isn't a tabloid.  But it was starting to look like a british-style
scandal rag for a while...
 
And Chip reinforced the copyright issues.
 
So I'm going to try to guide things to a better S/N ratio.
 
See next item.
 
[Posted in FML issue 0453]