Is this a den of criminals?

My knowledge of copyright law is limited, but as for the width of pages...it looks perfect on a 1024x768 screen, which is basically the standard for the web these days. As screen resolutions continue to increase, sticking with the standard 800x600 makes for unreadable pages at the larger sizes. While the layout could stand some tweaks, I don't think it's THAT bad.

Copyright law says that everything is copyrighted by the author upon being written and there are massive fines for unauthorized copying unless it's considered fair use. But there are not clear lines about fair use. Better ask your attorney. Wikipedia deals with this by rules and practices shown on virtually every page. You probably should as well.

On this page, if I make my window 100 percent of screen width, then I can eliminate the horizontal scrolling, but the left edge is covered by my dock. HTML was designed to allow web pages to fit to the given window. Why do you defeat that and virtually demand that all 1024 pixels be devoted to your page? That is rude and offensive to me. I think it IS that bad. Would you care to take a vote?

PBwiki pages work well at various window widths and they allow a discussion to be refined and improved instead of just getting longer like these pages.

Nitpicker, I have a bit of experience in Fair Use (I'm a librarian). You may be interested in this website (http://w2.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-ip.php). While this particular article discusses bloggers, I believe the same theories are applicable.

To sum it up quickly, short quotations are ok.

You may also be interested in reading Get Satisfaction's Terms of Service, which outline their terms for Content and Intellectual Property. (http://getsatisfaction.com/terms_of_s...). I believe #1 is relevant to your concerns

Nitpicker, be aware that Get Satisfaction's Terms of Service are in addition to PBwiki's Terms of Service. You must agree to be bound by both before receiving support for PBwiki using the Get Satisfaction service. Otherwise, you are limited to email support, regardless of Premium status.

Thanks Rachel, your pointers were bang on. I do love librarians.

Near as I can tell, those of us who quote an entire message and are NOT Get Satisfaction staff ARE criminals until GS grants US the rights that they grant themselves. In particular, if I were to mass copy a complete conversation even into a PBwiki page, without explicit permission of the authors and/or PB and/or GS officials, I would be violating copyrights. I personally doubt that anyone would sue me or that it would be sustained in court if they did, but formally, each of us who copies an entire message is at risk. We would all be saved if the terms of service specified that contributions were subject to the Creative Commons License. I recommend it. And bless Larry Lessig and the EFF for their selfless efforts for all of us.

If that doesn't happen, then I probably won't undertake to move stuff to a wiki, but instead I will just continue to bitch and moan about the ways that GS would work better if it were a wiki than it does as a forum. I would feel more constructive in the other medium. Tough.

I hereby assert that all my words are declared to be governed by the Creative Commons License. Feel free to copy them for any purpose including as horrible examples of this or that.