Posted on 12/08/2001 4:43:40 PM PST by Jim Robinson
What is Free Republic all about?Free Republic is a personal avocation and project of my own. Prior to Free Republic, I had been a regular poster on the Prodigy Whitewater News BBS. Prodigy was an online service similar to the Internet, but more limited in scope. You had to be a paying subscriber or member of the Prodigy service to access it.
Prodigy was, at that time, a joint venture of two giant multi-billion dollar, commercial for profit enterprises, namely, Sears and IBM corporations. On Prodigy, we had several hundred members of this particular Whitewater BBS and we were engaged in posting news articles, primarily regarding President Clinton and his corruption. We had been doing this for at least a couple years. I believe I got started on Prodigy sometime in 1993 or 1994.
Each Prodigy BBS (and there were many) had its own moderators. Moderators were regular Prodigy members just like the rest of us, but they had volunteered to serve as moderators and they came and went and were generally not all that visible or problematic. Some of the Prodigy moderators cautioned that they might delete copyrighted articles, but they almost never did. One particular moderator started deleting some of our posts and it wasn't because they were copyrighted. Other posts, in fact, thousands of them remained up and they were complete full text copies of copyrighted articles. The posts were deleted simply because of the nature of their content and several of our members raised quite a stink about it.
This was in 1996, and I had already started getting interested in the Internet by that time. My company had acquired a small ISP service in 1995, and I was learning how it operates and saw its potential.
Prodigy had a very limited scope in terms of attracting a large audience. You had to be a paying subscriber to Prodigy in order to access the postings and, at the time, any serious participation was fairly expensive as they did not offer flat rates. You had to pay by the hour for access.
I wanted a larger participation and I did not want to be controlled by others. I had learned enough about the internet and how to establish websites, and thought that I could establish my own site and hopefully develop a larger readership than we had on Prodigy.
I had not been all that politically active prior to President Clinton's election. Yes, I complained about government and politics just like everyone else, and I participated in every election since I got out of the service in 1969, but politics was not particularly high on my list of priorities -- until Slick came along.
I had been a registered Democrat, but I did not necessarily vote Democratic. My first vote in a presidential election was cast for Richard M. Nixon. Over the years, I had began reading and listening more and more to conservative writers and commentators. I knew that the newspapers and news media were lying and I knew that government had been encroaching on our individual rights and that our politicians were as corrupt as the day is long. I also knew that nothing would be done about it unless we the people somehow joined together to exercise our political free speech rights to expose the corruption and demand that it be stopped and demand that the erosion of our individual rights be stopped and reversed.
As a result of all this, I set up the Free Republic website in September of 1996. At first I posted all the materials myself. I searched the internet looking for forum software, but was not very successful in finding any. I found and tested a few products, but they were all fairly primitive and did not have the features I was looking for. There were not very many forum software products on the market at that time, so I decided to develop my own.
I wrote the original version of our forum software and installed it on my website in January or February of 1997. Then I posted notices on BBSes, forums and newsgroups all around the Internet and invited others to join me in our political free speech forum. I also submitted my URL to as many search engines as I could find.
I also continued my Prodigy membership well up into the middle of 1997 and everything I posted on Free Republic, I also posted to Prodigy and included a link back to my forum. I was never kicked off of Prodigy for any reason as some have alleged. I also posted many articles and threads to the various political newsgroups and included a link back.
Soon people began reading and participating in Free Republic and the rest is history.
Free Republic is simply a political bulletin board and it was and is not a commercial business. The concept of posting copyrighted news articles under the fair use rules for discussion purposes is not new and is not mine. It had been a long standing practice, engaged in by huge multibillion dollar international corporations like Prodigy, (owned by Sears and IBM), Genie, Compuserve and many others, as well as wide open newsgroups and tiny one man operations on the Internet or even on private BBSes. And prior to computers, the practice of news clipping and posting and or reprinting had been going on since the times of our founding fathers. Political free speech was essential to our founders then, and is still essential today in order to maintain freedom and guard from tyranny.
The Congress is forbidden by the first amendment of making any law that would control or abridge or restrict or diminish our right to free speech. Free Republic is nothing more than an electronic edition of the original Liberty Tree.
We post articles and invite our participants to comment on them. We share them, compare them, examine them, look for lies or inconsistencies, expose corruption, praise good works, condemn the bad, spread the word, debate, develop plans and strategies, build activist groups, and carry out various activism projects. All of these activities are guaranteed us by our Constitution and we are definitely operating squarely within our constitutional rights and within the letter and intent of the law.
The fact that my personal avocation has grown beyond the point that I can no longer pay for it myself without help from willing donors does not change the underlying concept. It is a primarily a political discussion forum and it is a constitutionally protected activity. Nothing more nothing less.
When the first alleged copyright and unfair competition complaints came in, I posted them to Free Republic and many people discussed and debated the facts and options and whether or not we should fold up or fight off any attacks on our forum. Many of these people offering their opinion were lawyers and many of them (including our own Brian Buckley) said that we were operating well within our rights and that we should continue and that we should fight for our rights.
Well we did.
To be continued in Part II.
Just like free speech doesn't include a right to be published against the will of the publisher, I think free speech doesn't include a right to republish creative works against the will of the author (or his publisher).
There are ways to direct people to the full text of articles while enabling their discussion. If it really was a conflict between property rights and free speech, it might be different. But it's only a conflict between property rights and convince.
Sorry; you are wrong.
The First Amendment was placed because the Anti-Federalists knew that if not protected, your right to undiluted and honest information about the state of the nation would be hobbled and curtailed by the powers that be. You just try to go into a Presidential, Senate, or Congressional news-conference. You don't have the requisite papers to attend; you won't get in. In defense of those requirements, the purpose of establishing some form of orderly distribution of the news means that some of us, the Citizens, will be unable to get in but all of us will get the information as disseminated. The right for us to discuss, dissemble, decry, and detail the anomalies of competing press accounts is the sole reason for the People having the freedom of the press, and not for the corporations to have a copyright.
News, editorials, opinion-pieces, pertaining to current events in government, law, and politics is all fair game to the People.
Art, inventions, research compilations, fictional works, are the items for copyright.
Do you think news is creative content?
What better time to buy than when the industry is in a slump? Remember the old saw "buy low, sell high".
The moment FR leaves a "non-commercial" status, it loses the fair use defense and leaves itself open to many legal and civil problems.
FreeRepublic ISP LLC. would be a completely separate legal entity from FreeRepublic.com LLC.
The donations are working. Why ruin a good thing?
More is better. If Jim and the Mrs. can put a few dollars in the bank, maybe take a cruise, and make donations to FreeRepublic.com from the ISP proceeds, so much the better.
Most of what's posted here is not only creative content, it's commercial goods. 90% of the people who post here can report the news, but 99% of those would make lousy syndicated columnists.
Nothing's being withheld from the people by limiting full text copy and republication. The source of the discussions taking place here would still just be a click away.
I think you have to have MUCH bigger numbers to make a nationwide ISP financially viable.
This statement is just naive.
Also, there is a Part II, and at the moment, a coming Part III. Search for by:"Jim Robinson" to find those...
Enlighten me oh wise one.
Is it possible, nay probable, that the LATWP accounting geeks don't know what the legal geeks are up to with their barbara streisand "copyright" lawsuits? Ouch! ;-)
I am really not trying to make you uncomfortable, but can I suggest that it is your duty as a patriot to speak up in other venues? One possible down side of FR is that we tend to clan-up here instead of circulating and spreading the word.
I think maybe the posts and the good points we make on other forum are more valuable in the end than those we sing to the choir hear.
I come here for ammo and then, head back to the battlefield of debate and ideas. If you accept your feeling that you can't speak freely any place else, if you don't stand up for what you really believe in all places at all times, you are enabling the day when it really will be imposible to speak freely.
Take courage from this site and use it everyday.
Do you drink as you write? Internet people have such a wide variety quirks and agendas that I'm not motivated to follow a stranger's riddles, teasers or hints. Your writing style's amusing, but I can't spend time on this right now without seeing a return.
Why do you ask? Looking for a drinking companion? ;-)
The source of the discussions taking place here would still just be a click away.
I guess you haven't discovered that URLs can be changed en masse, in a matter of seconds. I could disable all the links on a site built up over years in under a minute, given access to the administrative PC. Is this so hard to understand?
Archiving and reporting are two separate FR features. Archives are not lost to the public as I mentioned to NittanyLion in #121. If FR is intent on being an online library for back issues, their software could easily be set up to periodically check for broken links and then display the original copy made at time of posting (if that's really important). But then the copyright issue pops up again.
I personally don't think it's important. There are other paid services for archiving periodicals. Lexis/Nexis comes to mind. I dont know how they deal with the copyright issue.
I think that 90% of FR's value doesn't involve article archiving. I think 75% of FR's appeal will remain if we had to link to full text. I think that's a fair price to pay for maintaining our principles. I think it was Dr. Laura that said, "It's not a principle until it costs you something."
And sure, I'll have a drink with you. Make it to the Keys, and we'll argue in person.
Not at all. I don't believe in breaking the law and neither do 90% of the people who are reading the articles posted on FR.
Do you read articles on FR without paying the source or visiting the site? Have you ever DL'd an MP3 or made a copy of a cassette or VCR tape? You don't have to answer because it's a rhetorical question and I already know the answer.
We should not condone breaking laws that we don't agree with, but whether or not anyone is breaking the law is a totally moot point. Metallica spent a few mil going after Napster, and all they got for it was a bunch of pissed off fans and 50 copycat sites for their trouble. If JR was ordered to shut down FR, all he would have to do is move to another country that doesn't have our copyright laws and start it up again.
Things are changing whether our antiquated 19th copyright system wants it to or not. I'm not even arguing if it's good, bad, right or wrong. It's simply a fact of life that (unlike terrorism as per your example) is infinite can't be stopped.
Unfortunately the dinosaur ideologue controllers may win this one and ruin something great while accompishing nothing. No justice will be served and no wrong will be righted.
All we'll have is a disabled vet with an ulcer and a looted bank account while a lot of rat pig leftists pat themselves on the back.
During the Clinton criminality, the WP and L A Times conspired to slap-sue a site that enabled people of intelligence to first pick apart their propaganda masquerading as journalism, and then secondly, disseminate the smashing analyis nationally and instantly. This greatily interfered with the setting of the national perception and understanding of events normally orchestrated by the liberal media.
During that pursuit of corruption and criminality many instances were found in the media where a story, and its related URL was pulled or altered by senior editors. Only a full-text, real-time version could preserve the evidence of the criminality and the related management of the news by the liberal media.
If that isn't related to free speech and a free press, then I wish somone would tell me what is.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.