20.3.1. It may seem illogical for a Cypherpunk to assert some kind of
copyright. Perhaps. But my main concern is the ease with
which people can relabel documents as their own, sometimes
after only adding a few words here and there.
20.3.2. Yes, I used the words of others in places, to make points
better than I felt my own words would, to save time, and to
give readers a different voice speaking on issues. I have
credited quotes with a "[Joe Foobar, place, date]
attribution, usually at the end of the quote. If a place is
not listed, it is the Cypherpunks list itself. The author and
date should be sufficient to (someday) retrieve the source
text. By the way, I used quotes as they seemed appropriate,
and make no claims that the quoted points are necessarily
original to the author--who may have remembered them from
somewhere else--or that the date listed is the origination
date for the point. I have something like 80 megabytes of
Cypherpunks posts, so I couldn't do an archaeological dig for
the earliest mention of an idea.
20.3.3. People can quote this FAQ under the "fair use" provisions,
e.g., a paragraph or two, with credits. Anything more than a
few paragraphs constitutes copyright infringement, as I
understand it.
20.3.4. Should I give up the maintaining of this FAQ and/or should
others get involved, then the normal co-authorship and
inheritance arrangements will be possible.
20.3.5. The Web. WWW and Mosaic offer amazing new opportunities for
on-line documents. It is in fact likely that this FAQ will be
available as a Web document. My concern, however, is that the
integrity and authorship be maintained. Thus, splitting the
document in a hundred or more little pieces, with no
authorship attached, would not be cool. Also, I intend to
maintain this document with my powerful outlining tools
(Symantec's "MORE," on a Macintosh) and thus anyone who
"freezes" the document and uses it as a base for links,
pointers, etc., will be left behind as mods are made.
By Tim May, see README
HTML by Jonathan Rochkind