I think the answer and solution are easy. "Ownership" isn't hard to determine. Almost any country in the world, including the United States, have signed the Berne convention. Which means that unless an author clearly revokes or changes his rights, anything someone creates (including writes) has his/her copyright.
But copyright also gives a solution for the percieved dilemma. If you are afraid your reply isn't going to make sense on its own, then quote the parts you are replying to. Copyright laws do give you the right to quote if that's necessary to write your article.
This isn't a new problem. Usenet has been around since, oh, 20+ years, and email even longer. Parent articles might not be available to the reader, either because they are superseeded, expired, or because they never made it to the reader. It's also inconvenient to have to swap to one or more parent articles. So people quote what they are responding to, and each article makes sense in its own right. They are self-contained.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|