On 9/3/2020 3:50 AM, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
> 1. Can you tell me who owned the work on the CD and could distribute it?
> (assuming I could locate them and get in touch)
>
The contents of the CD were and are owned by the individual authors. The
History of the Working Group (HIWG) asked for, what was known at the time, a
compilation copyright. The right to gather and publish the material either on CD
or online assuming no alteration of the material. Especially not removing the
name or assuming the copyright of the article.
Why would that copyright have changed?
Is the right to distribute the information solely vested in HIWG? Or was it just a generalized permission to distribute as long as the package was unchanged?
I mean, that's the way something like that might happen today - a lot of software and other creations work under newer licenses/copyright stipulations that say 'you can distribute it, you just can't change it or charge for it'.
Was the HIWG ever incorporated or given a legal existence? If not, it must have effectively been the distributor that had the permission.
Tom B
> 2. Was it free? Or was it always a paid product? If it was free, I'm assuming
> (maybe wrongly?) that it ought to be redistributable (maybe?).
>
When Bryan Borich was distributing the CD it was "free", but you needed to pay
for the physical media ($2-$5) and postage ($1) to mail it to you. This is how I
got my copy.
The problem now is the HIWG is defunct, so no one is sure who has a right to
distribute the data.
> 3. If someone who has it could do a review of its contents (there's one for
> Jeff's Frontier Traveller magazine!), that would be helpful. I don't even have
> any sort of idea of formats, organization, or content involved (other than in
> the most 10,000 foot view sort). It'd be nice to have a better idea what was on
> the CD. It might be as simple as a file listing if the files were by topic or by
> discussion thread or whatever. Or maybe there's more to characterizing the
> contents...
>
The contents were a messy mixture of software, random files from different FTP
sites, the early archives of the TML and other mailing lists, the mostly
archived documents from the HIWG groups, artwork and deckplans in graphic
formats unreadable by existing software, and a few fanzines.
> I'm sorry I missed this when it was available to be had. I don't think I even
> heard about HIWG (as something open to the public) until quite late and didn't
> hear about the presence of the CD until it was no longer available.
>
HIWG ceased being an active organization around the time of publication of TNE
(93-94). And since the internet wasn't a thing in that era you needed to either
be aware of the project by knowing someone who was a part of it, or know the
circle of dedicated fans (e.g. being on the TML) to be a part of the project.
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