inamerrata

Apparently a week’s mail is a 166MB these days for me; I may be on too many lists. In the past week, 1.9kB of that mail were a couple of missives from Charles Plessy, related to one of my blog posts from last month. Apparently he’s embarassed at being associated with what he wrote, and seems to think the best way to approach this is to assert absolute control over the text as his intellectual property and threaten to contact my ISP. Obviously, I disagree, both morally on the grounds that I don’t care for supposed supporters of free software that resort to insults and legal threats, and legally on the grounds I don’t think Charles has any reasonable case to disassociate himself from his own words.

Just for the hell of it, his followup mails and mine are below the fold.

Subject: Thanks for your public answer, but could you keep it private?
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2006 15:28:37 +0900

Dear AJ,

Thanks for your public answer to my private email. As I sent it privately to avoid one of those ego contests that apppear from time to time on -devel, I would appreciate that you would keep it private by removing my last name from your web page.

http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2006/01/13#2006-01-13-yayhatemail

PS : In this web page, the words “I hate” are from you.

Best,

What should you do if you don’t receive a response to your request of Thursday evening about a three week old issue over the weekend? How about if you’re trying to “avoid one of those ego contests”? Why naturally you should escalate the conflict first thing Monday morning:

Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 08:59:53 +0900
Subject: [update] Thanks for your public answer, but could you keep it private?

On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 03:28:37PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote :
[The above mail]

Dear Anthony Towns,

It seems that you have been busy, so I understand that you could not do the modification of your blog yet. In the meantime, I read a bit about my rights, and they fall in two categories.

– As the writer of the mail you publish, I am the copyright holder, and you have no right to redistribute it, or derivatives of it, nor to relicense it under a Creative Commons licence.

– The french law forbids the publishing of private correspondence, and I have no doubt that the australian law have some similar rules.

So here is the licence I am proposing to you :

—————————–
I am hereby granting Anthony Towns the right to publish contents of this
e-mail, and the ones I sent him in January 2006, provided that no
mention is made of my last name, Plessy (this includes my e-mail address).
—————————–

If you do not accept it, please delete the quotes of my e-mail in the article of your blog of friday the 13th of january 2006.

It seems to me that a one week deadline is reasonnable. Past this delay, I will have contact your ISP.

Best regards,

I won’t post it because I’m not inclined to inflict spammers on anyway, but you can probably work out Charles’ email address from the original -devel thread if you care.

From: Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 08:59:53AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> It seems that you have been busy, so I understand that you could not do
> the modification of your blog yet. In the meantime, I read a bit about
> my rights, and they fall in two categories.

Actually I simply hadn’t seen your mail.

> – As the writer of the mail you publish, I am the copyright holder, and
> you have no right to redistribute it, or derivatives of it, nor to
> relicense it under a Creative Commons licence.

You can assert that if you like; but I disagree. I don’t think your mail contains enough originality for copyright to apply, I believe that publication of it falls under fair use considerations given the lack of commercial value to it, and the value to the public of having it not be left secret. Furthermore, in sending the mail to me in response to topic being discussed in public, I don’t believe you have any right to insist that it be private.
> So here is the licence I am proposing to you :

I have no interest in obtaining a license from you.

> —————————–
> I am hereby granting Anthony Towns the right to publish contents of this
> e-mail, and the ones I sent him in January 2006, provided that no
> mention is made of my last name, Plessy (this includes my e-mail address).
> —————————–

I’m sorry you’re ashamed of what you’ve written and do not wish to be associated with it. In future, I hope you’ll consider whether your writing is embarassing before hitting send.